CVE-2022-23511 Amazon CloudWatch Agent for Windows has Privilege Escalation Vector

What is CVE-2022-23511?

CVE-2022-23511 is a high-severity vulnerability in aws amazon-cloudwatch-agent, published on 12 Dec 2022. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

A privilege escalation issue exists within the Amazon CloudWatch Agent for Windows, software for collecting metrics and logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers, in versions up to and including v1.247354. When users trigger a repair of the Agent, a pop-up window opens with SYSTEM permissions. Users with administrative access to affected hosts may use this to create a new command prompt as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. To trigger this issue, the third party must be able to access the affected host and elevate their privileges such that they're able to trigger the agent repair process. They must also be able to install the tools required to trigger the issue. This issue does not affect the CloudWatch Agent for macOS or Linux. Agent users should upgrade to version 1.247355 of the CloudWatch Agent to address this issue. There is no recommended work around. Affected users must update the installed version of the CloudWatch Agent to address this issue.

Weakness: CWE-274

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-23511?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent. It affects 1 product.

Products include Amazon Cloudwatch Agent.

How do I fix CVE-2022-23511?

Upgrade github.com/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent to 1.247355.0 or later.

Is CVE-2022-23511 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-23511 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-j8x2-2m5w-j939, GO-2022-1160.