FortiGate admin interface authentication bypass

There are rumors about a vulnerability in Fortinets FortiGate firewalls where you may bypass authentication on their admin interfaces. Affected seem to be FortiOS 7.0.x and FortiOS 7.2.0/1. A fix is included in FortiOS 7.0.7 and FortiOS 7.2.2. It is written the vulnerability has CVE-2022-40684.

It is imperative that you protect your FortiGate interfaces with TrustedHosts AND Local-In-Policies. Only using TrustHosts protects HTTPS, SSH, etc but not other protocols like SIP, IPsec, CAPWAP, BGP, SSLVPN* etc which are also local services running on the FortiGate, which need to be protected, too.

*SSLVPN = Even though SSLVPN might be not configured and therefore seems to be inactive, in some cases for example vulnerability-scanners still trigger the SSLVPN service to log errors in FortiGates log. This only is solved by setting up local-in-polices.

Example for trusthost & local-in-policy:

CLI configuration:

System > Administrators >
config system admin
    edit "admin"
        set trusthost1 172.26.73.48 255.255.255.255
        set accprofile "super_admin"
        set vdom "root"
    next
end

Configuring address and address group as per the trusted hosts:

config firewall address
    edit "trusted-1"
        set type ipmask
        set comment ''
        set visibility enable
        set associated-interface ''
        set color 0
        set allow-routing disable
        set subnet 172.26.73.48 255.255.255.255
    next
end

config firewall addrgrp
    edit "trusted_grp"
        set member "trusted-1"
        set comment ''
        set visibility enable
        set color 0
    next
end

Configuring Firewall local in policies:

config firewall local-in-policy
    edit 2
        set intf "port1"
        set srcaddr "trusted_grp"
        set dstaddr "all"
        set action accept
        set service "PING"
        set schedule "always"
        set status enable
        set comments ''
    next
    edit 1
        set intf "port1"
        set srcaddr "all"
        set dstaddr "all"
        set action deny
        set service "PING"
        set schedule "always"
        set status enable
        set comments ''
    next
end

Remember: This example shows the local-in-policy only for "ping". You want to protect all services (except for example SSLVPN or IPsec if you use them).