CVE-2021-37624: FreeSWITCH does not authenticate SIP MESSAGE requests, leading to spam and message spoofing

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2021-37624 is a high (CVSS 7.5) Improper Authentication vulnerability in freeswitch. EPSS estimates a 3.78% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 90% of scored vulnerabilities. 2 public exploits are recorded.

Timeline

1. 25-10-2021
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 04-08-2024
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

FreeSWITCH is a Software Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation from proprietary telecom switches to a software implementation that runs on any commodity hardware. Prior to version 1.10.7, FreeSWITCH does not authenticate SIP MESSAGE requests, leading to spam and message spoofing. By default, SIP requests of the type MESSAGE (RFC 3428) are not authenticated in the affected versions of FreeSWITCH. MESSAGE requests are relayed to SIP user agents registered with the FreeSWITCH server without requiring any authentication. Although this behaviour can be changed by setting the `auth-messages` parameter to `true`, it is not the default setting. Abuse of this security issue allows attackers to send SIP MESSAGE messages to any SIP user agent that is registered with the server without requiring authentication. Additionally, since no authentication is required, chat messages can be spoofed to appear to come from trusted entities. Therefore, abuse can lead to spam and enable social engineering, phishing and similar attacks. This issue is patched in version 1.10.7. Maintainers recommend that this SIP message type is authenticated by default so that FreeSWITCH administrators do not need to be explicitly set the `auth-messages` parameter. When following such a recommendation, a new parameter can be introduced to explicitly disable authentication.

• CWE-287Improper AuthenticationWhen an actor claims to have a given identity, the product does not prove or insufficiently proves that the claim is correct.
• CWE-306Missing Authentication for Critical FunctionalityThe product does not perform any authentication for functionality that requires a provable user identity or consumes a significant amount of resources.