In the past year the number of lecture sessions with traumatizing headlines about hacking SAP systems has dramatically risen. Their content, however, is usually the same. Insecure implementations of algorithms, side effects in commands, flawed business logic and designs that brilliantly miss the point of security. In essence, security defects built into the SAP framework by mistake.
This session, however, demonstrates several security defects in SAP NetWeaver that do not appear to have been created by mistake. In order to make a point, I will first discuss with the audience what exactly defines a backdoor. Then I will demonstrate several security defects discovered by me & my team and finally discuss with the audience if these defects qualify as backdoors. All security defects shown are highly critical and have never been publicly discussed before.* They enable attackers to remotely execute arbitrary ABAP commands and arbitrary OS commands. In essence, full control over SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP.
Andreas Wiegenstein has been working as a professional SAP security consultant since 2003. He performed numerous SAP security audits and received credit for more than 80 SAP security patches related to vulnerabilities he discovered in various SAP products. As CTO at Virtual Forge GmbH he leads Research & Innovation, a team focusing on SAP specific security research and new security solutions. Andreas has trained large companies and defense organizations on SAP security and has spoken at multiple SAP-specific conferences (like TechEd, DSAG, BIZEC and SAPience) as well as at general security conferences such as Troopers, Black Hat, HITB, IT Defense, DeepSec and RSA. He researched the ABAP Top 20 Risks published by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and is co-author of the first book on ABAP security (SAP Press 2009). He is also member of BIZEC.org, the Business Security Community.