Cisco fixed command injection bug in IOx Application Hosting Environment

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.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, command injection)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.