Pierluigi Paganini
May 09, 2025
SonicWall patches three SMA 100 vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-32819, CVE-2025-32820, and CVE-2025-32821), including a potential zero-day, that could be chained by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code.
The first flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-32819 (CVSS score of 8.8), is a Post-Authentication SSLVPN user arbitrary file delete vulnerability.
“A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSLVPN user privileges to bypass the path traversal checks and delete an arbitrary file potentially resulting in a reboot to factory default settings.” reads the advisory.
The second vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32820 (CVSS score of 8.3), is a Post-Authentication SSLVPN user Path Traversal issue. An authenticated remote attacker can use path traversal via SSLVPN to make any directory on the SMA appliance writable.
The third flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-32821 (CVSS score of 6.7), is a Post-Authentication SSLVPN admin remote command injection vulnerability.
“A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSLVPN admin privileges can with admin privileges can inject shell command arguments to upload a file on the appliance.” states the advisory.
Rapid7 researchers discovered the vulnerabilities in April of 2025. The researchers states that an attacker with SSLVPN access can chain the three flaws to gain admin rights, write to system directories, and achieve root-level RCE. Fixed in version 10.2.1.15-81sv.
“An attacker with access to an SMA SSLVPN user account can chain these vulnerabilities to make a sensitive system directory writable, elevate their privileges to SMA administrator, and write an executable file to a system directory.” reads the report published by Rapid7. “This chain results in root-level remote code execution. These vulnerabilities have been fixed in version 10.2.1.15-81sv.”
Researchers demonstrated a full exploit chain on SonicWall SMA using the three flaws. Starting from a low-privilege session cookie, they reset the admin password by deleting a database file, made /bin writable, and executed a reverse shell payload to achieve root-level remote code execution.
Rapid7 researchers believe that this vulnerability may have been exploited in attacks in the wild.
“Based on known (private) IOCs and Rapid7 incident response investigations, we believe this vulnerability may have been used in the wild,” Rapid7 says.
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