THE THREAT
Cisco has announced the availability of Cisco Security Manager Release 4.22 to address three previously undisclosed vulnerabilities affecting the Cisco Security Manager software used to manage Cisco security devices. These vulnerabilities, if exploited, would allow threat actors to read static credentials, steal sensitive information, and execute commands on vulnerable devices. These vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed on November 16th, and are tracked as CVE-2020-27125, CVE-2020-27130, and CVE-2020-27131.
Security updates to address CVE-2020-27125 and CVE-2020-27130 were released by Cisco on November 10th and should be highly prioritized to be updated as part of a patch management program. Security patches to address CVE-2020-27131 have not been released at the time of writing.
On November 17th, 2020, Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code was made publicly available by the researcher who reported these vulnerabilities [1]. Exploitation in the wild has not been identified at this time but is expected in the immediate future due to the release of PoC code.
What we’re doing about it
- MVS has plugins in place to identify CVE-2020-27125 and CVE-2020-27130
- MVS will automatically add the relevant checks once they are made available
- eSentire security teams continue to track this topic for additional details and detection opportunities
What you should do about it
- Ensure the Cisco Security Manager is not exposed to the internet
- Update to Cisco Security Manager Release 4.22
- Workarounds are not available for any of the mentioned vulnerabilities, raising the importance applying available security updates as soon as possible
- Once made available, update to Cisco Security Manager Release 4.23
Additional information
CVE-2020-27125 allows an unauthenticated and remote threat actor to access sensitive information on vulnerable systems. The vulnerability is due to insufficient protection of static credentials included in the product code. In order to exploit this vulnerability, a threat actor would need to view the product’s source code. CVE-2020-27125 has a criticality rating of 7.4/10.
CVE-2020-27130 is a path traversal vulnerability that would allow a remote and unauthenticated threat actor to exfiltrate sensitive information from vulnerable devices. Exploitation can be achieved by sending a maliciously crafted request to a vulnerable device. The vulnerability is due to a lack of proper validation of directory traversal character sequences and has received a criticality rating of 9.1/10.
CVE-2020-27131 is the title for multiple vulnerabilities found in the Java deserialization function used in the Cisco Security Manager. Based on the description provided by Cisco, these vulnerabilities allow for arbitrary code execution by a remote and unauthenticated threat actor. These vulnerabilities are rated 8.1/10. Security updates to address CVE-2020-27131 are currently unavailable but are scheduled to be included in the Cisco Security Manager Release 4.23.
References:
[1] https://gist.github.com/Frycos/8bf5c125d720b3504b4f28a1126e509e
