HP OpenView software provided large-scale system and network management of an organization’s IT infrastructure. One of the modules provided by HP OpenView is the Network Node Manager (NNM), which supplies web-based tools to view status of a network. NNM provides several CGI applications which allow users to manage the NNM server using a web browser. One of the CGI applications, getnnmdata.exe, provides a way for clients to query information from an HP OpenView server.

There exists a buffer overflow vulnerability in HP OpenView Network Node Manager. Specifically, the vulnerability is due to insufficient boundary checking when getnnmdata.exe handles the MaxAge parameter. When getnnmdata.exe receives an invalid MaxAge parameter, it prints the invalid value in an error message. The vulnerable code does not validate the length of the MaxAge parameter and copies the whole string into a fixed-length stack-based buffer.

A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request (which contains crafted MaxAge parameter) to the target server. Successful exploitation would overwrite critical stack data, such as return addresses and exception handlers, and lead to arbitrary code injection and execution. In the case code execution is not successful, the vulnerable process may terminate abnormally, resulting a denial of service condition.

The CVE identifier for this vulnerability is CVE-2010-1553.

SonicWALL has released an IPS signature to detect and block specific exploitation attempts targeting this vulnerability. The signature is listed below:

• 5322 HP OpenView NNM MaxAge BO Attempt