Cisco fixed a high-severity flaw in the IOx application hosting environment that can be exploited in command injection attacks.
Cisco has released security updates to address a command injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-20076, in the Cisco IOx application hosting environment.
“A vulnerability in the Cisco IOx application hosting environment could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root on the underlying host operating system.” reads the advisory published by the IT giant.
The root cause of the flaw is the incomplete sanitization of parameters that are passed in for activation of an application.
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by deploying and activating an application in the Cisco IOx application hosting environment with a crafted activation payload file.” continues the advisory. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root on the underlying host operating system.”
The CVE-2023-20076 flaw affects devices that are running Cisco IOS XE Software if they have the IOx feature enabled and they do not support native docker.
The vulnerability also impacts the following products, which do not support native docker, if they are running a vulnerable software release and have the Cisco IOx feature enabled:
- 800 Series Industrial ISRs
- Catalyst Access Points (COS-APs)
- CGR1000 Compute Modules
- IC3000 Industrial Compute Gateways (software releases earlier than 1.2.1)
- IR510 WPAN Industrial Routers
The vulnerability was discovered by the researchers Sam Quinn and Kasimir Schulz from the Trellix Advanced Research Center.
The flaw doesn’t affect Catalyst 9000 Series switches, IOS XR and NX-OS software, or Meraki products.
Cisco’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) confirmed that it is not aware of attacks in the wild exploring this flaw.
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