Researcher Discloses Critical RCE Flaws In Cisco Security Manager

Cisco has published multiple security advisories concerning
critical flaws in Cisco Security Manager (CSM) a week after the
networking equipment maker quietly released patches with version
4.22 of the platform.

The development comes after Code White researcher Florian Hauser
(frycos) yesterday publicly disclosed proof-of-concept (PoC^[1]) code for as many as 12
security vulnerabilities affecting the web interface of CSM^[2]
that makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to achieve
remote code execution (RCE) attacks.

The flaws were responsibly reported to Cisco’s Product Security
Incident Response Team (PSIRT) three months ago, on July 13.

“Since Cisco PSIRT became unresponsive and the published release
4.22 still doesn’t mention any of the vulnerabilities,” claimed frycos^[3]
in a tweet, citing the reasons for going public with the PoCs
yesterday.

Cisco Security Manager^[4]
is an end-to-end enterprise solution that allows organizations to
enforce access policies and manage and configure firewalls and
intrusion prevention systems in a network.

The company released the 4.22 version of CSM^[5]
on November 9 with a number of security enhancements, including
support for AnyConnect Web Security WSO^[6] along with deprecating
MD5 hash algorithm and DES and 3DES encryption algorithms.

The vulnerabilities allow an attacker^[7]
to craft malicious requests as well as upload and download
arbitrary files in the context of the highest-privilege user
account “NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,” giving the adversary access to all
files in a specific directory.

“The vulnerability is due to improper validation of directory
traversal character sequences within requests to an affected
device,” Cisco said in its advisory^[8]. “An attacker could
exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the
affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to
download arbitrary files from the affected device.”

The flaw has a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10, making it critical
in severity.

A separate flaw (CVSS score: 8.1) due to an insecure Java deserialization^[9] function used by CSM
could have allowed an unauthenticated, remote attacker with system
privileges to execute arbitrary commands on an affected device.

However, Cisco is yet to address the flaw, with a planned fix
set to be included in Cisco Security Manager Release 4.23.

The company also said it’s aware of public announcements about
the vulnerabilities and that it hasn’t so far found any evidence
that the flaws were exploited in the wild.