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Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CVE-2019-1732

Medium
6.4/10

Summary

A vulnerability in the Remote Package Manager (RPM) subsystem of Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrator credentials to leverage a time-of-check, time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition to corrupt local variables, which could lead to arbitrary command injection. The vulnerability is due to the lack of a proper locking mechanism on critical variables that need to stay static until used. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to an affected device and issuing a set of RPM-related CLI commands. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform arbitrary command injection. The attacker would need administrator credentials for the targeted device.

  • HIGH
  • LOCAL
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • HIGH
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-78 - OS Command Injection

The OS command injection weakness (also known as shell injection) is a vulnerability which enables an attacker to run arbitrary OS commands on a server. This is done by modifying the intended downstream OS command and injecting arbitrary commands, enabling the execution of unauthorized OS commands. This has the potential to fully compromise the application along with all of its data, and, if the compromised process does not follow the principle of least privileges, it may compromise other parts of the hosting infrastructure as well. This weakness is listed as number ten in the 'CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses'.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published