CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-15909 — SolarWinds N-central through 2020.1 allows session hijacking and requires user interaction or physical access

High CVSS 8.8

SolarWinds N-central through 2020.1 allows session hijacking and requires user interaction or physical access. The N-Central JSESSIONID cookie attribute is not checked against multiple sources such as sourceip, MFA claim, etc. as long as the victim stays logged in within N-Central. To take advantage of this, cookie could be stolen and the JSESSIONID can be captured. On its own this is not a surprising result; low security tools allow the cookie to roam from machine to machine. The JSESSION cookie can then be used on the attackers’ workstation by browsing to the victim’s NCentral server URL and replacing the JSESSIONID attribute value by the captured value. Expected behavior would be to check this against a second source and enforce at least a reauthentication or multi factor request as N-Central is a highly privileged service.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.8 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-384

Affected products

  • solarwinds / n-central

Matched remediation archetype

General vulnerability remediation

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Confirm the affected component, deployment paths, reachable interfaces, and enabled features from inventories and configuration, without probing production destructively.
  • Compare the advisory's affected conditions with the repository lockfiles, build manifests, artifacts, and runtime inventory.
  • Identify data sensitivity, trust boundaries, and privilege level for every confirmed affected deployment.

Remediate safely

  • Apply a vendor-supported fix or remove the affected component or feature; record the selected change and its source in the repository.
  • Update direct and transitive dependency locks, generated artifacts, deployment manifests, and asset inventories together.
  • Add a regression test for the documented unsafe condition using inert inputs and preserve rollback instructions.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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