1. 'Zabbix Security: Client-Server Communication Seems Insecure'

    Mon 27 September 2010

    Zabbix is a populair tool for monitoring servers, services and network equipment. For monitoring hosts, Zabbix provides an agent that can be installed on the hosts that must be monitored.

    Based on the supplied documentation and some remarks on the internets, the 'security' of Zabbix agents seems to rely on an IP-filter. It only accepts traffic from a specific IP-address. However, the protocol that is used between the Zabbix server and agents is unencrypted and does not seem to employ any additional authentication.

    With a man-in-the-middle attack, pretending to be the Zabbix server, you would be able to compromise all servers running Zabbix. If remote commands are enabled on these hosts, the damage that could be done may be something you don't want to think about. Or maybe you do. Although it is true that for such an attack to be possible, as an attacker you need access to a system within the same network (VLAN) as the server, but none the less, it is just not secure.

    Personally I don't think that Zabbix is suitable for high-security environments, due to the lack of encryption of sensitive data and the weak authentication mechanism.

    Zabbix should employ at least SSL as a means for encrypted transport and use a password or shared secret for authentication. Even better would be the use of client-side certificates such as implemented by the system management tool Puppet.

    [update]

    Please note that Nagios agents also seem to work this way, but I have no experience with Nagios so I can't say for sure.

    And Nagios is widely deployed in the enterprise...

    Tagged as : zabbix security

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