Cisco addresses a critical flaw in Elastic Services Controller

Cisco released security updates to address a critical vulnerability in its virtualized function automation tool Elastic Services Controller (ESC).

Cisco has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability affecting its virtualized function automation tool, Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC). The flaw could be exploited by a remote attacker could be exploited by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to take full control of impacted systems.

The flaw is an authentication bypass issue, it received the identifies CVE-2019-1867 and has been rated with a CVSS score of 10 out of 10.

Cisco ESC allows automating the deployment and monitoring of functions running on their virtual machines.

“A vulnerability in the REST API of Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication on the REST API.” reads the security advisory published by Cisco.

“The vulnerability is due to improper validation of API requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the REST API. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary actions through the REST API with administrative privileges on an affected system.”

The flaw is caused by the improper validation of API requests and can be exploited by sending specially crafted requests to the REST API.

An attacker can trigger the issue to bypass authentication on the REST API and run arbitrary commands with administrative privileges.

This flaw affects Cisco Elastic Services Controller running Software Release 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, or 4.4 when the REST API is enabled. Cisco remarks that the REST API is not enabled by default.

Cisco has addressed the vulnerability with the release of Cisco Elastic Services Controller Release 4.5.

The good news is that Cisco is not aware of attacks exploiting the vulnerability.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Cisco, hacking)

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