Six Critical Vulnerabilities in Adobe ColdFusion Get Patches

Adobe recently released a series of 11 security patches, including six rated critical, and urged Adobe ColdFusion users to start applying the updates ASAP.

The security advisory mentions that the 2018 and 2016 versions of ColdFusion, as well as version 11, have critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited to enable arbitrary code execution. Four critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-15965, CVE-2018-15957, CVE-2018-15958, CVE-2018-15959) involve deserialization of untrusted data, meaning they could enable arbitrary code execution.

The remaining two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-15961 and CVE-2018-15960) involve unrestricted file upload and the use of a component with a known vulnerability. No details were given on whether any of the six critical vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild, so it”s safe to speculate they were all part of a responsible disclosure program — the advisory names and thanks researchers for reporting them.

Two of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-15963 and CVE-2018-15962) from the entire batch are rated with a severity score of “Important,” enabling security bypass and directory listing. The final vulnerability in the back involves the use of a component with a known vulnerability to trigger an information disclosure vulnerability, and it was labeled CVE-2018-15964 and given a severity score of “Moderate”.

Adobe has been steadily releasing monthly security updates and patches as part of a continuous effort to make their products safer for users. However, there was a single exception in August, when Adobe released an unscheduled patch for Photoshop CC that fixed a memory corruption that could have enabled code execution.

On a closing note, Adobe also recommends that affected ColdFusion users install the appropriate JDK for the patches to work properly. JDK 8u121 or higher for ColdFusion 2016, respectively JDK 7u131 or JDK 8u121 for ColdFusion 11.