Kibana Timelion Arbitrary Code Execution

Kibana is an open-source visualisation plugin for Elasticsearch.The Timelion visualizer in Kibana versions prior to 5.6.15 and 6.6.1 has the ability to execute arbitrary code. An attacker with Timelion platform access may submit a request that attempts to execute javascript code. This may result in an attacker executing unauthorised commands on the host machine with the Kibana process’s permissions.

Vulnerability detection:

• Manually detecting
• Timelion function is enabled in kibana.yml.
• Version troubleshooting method: In the settings, look for the Kibana version.

Mitigation / Precaution

• Administrators and consumers of the Elastic Stack (or ELK Stack) can update to Kibana versions 5.6.15 or higher than 6.6.1.
• If updating is not an option at this time, Set timelion.enabled to false in the kibana.yml configuration file to disable Timelion.

Written by

Jijith Rajan

Cyber Security Engineer