Two months after critical vulnerabilities were patched in Apache Struts, a popular open-source framework for developing Java-based Web applications, VMware released a security update to incorporate the fixes in its vCenter Operations Management Suite product.
The vCenter Operations Management Suite can be used to monitor and manage the performance, capacity and configuration of virtualized infrastructure. It depends on Struts for some of its features.
“The Apache Struts library is updated to version 2.3.16.2 to address multiple security issues,” VMware said in a security advisory Tuesday that coincided with the release of vCenter Operations Management Suite (vCOps) version 5.8.2.
Apache Struts 2.3.16.2 was an emergency update released on April 24 after it was revealed that a fix included in Struts 2.3.16.1 for a remote code execution vulnerability was insufficient and could be bypassed.
The bypass was treated as a separate vulnerability and was assigned the CVE-2014-0112 tracking number, superseding the original issue known as CVE-2014-0094.
The vCOps 5.8.2 also incorporated a patch for a denial-of-service vulnerability tracked as CVE-2014-0050 that was also originally patched in Struts 2.3.16.1.
“VCOps is affected by both CVE-2014-0112 and CVE-2014-0050,” VMware said in its advisory. “Exploitation of CVE-2014-0112 may lead to remote code execution without authentication.”
Users of the older vCOps 5.7.x branch are advised to either upgrade to vCOps 5.8.2 or to manually apply a workaround described in a separate knowledge base article.
Another VMware product called vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is affected only by the denial-of-service issue (CVE-2014-0050), but no patch has been released yet.
This story has been corrected at 5:14 PM on June 27. A previous version of the story incorrectly suggested that a VMware product was affected by a vulnerability identified as CVE-2014-0116. The product is not affected by that vulnerability.