A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, was found in Cisco Email Security Appliance (Anti-Malware Software) (affected version not known). This affects some unknown functionality. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a response splitting vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-113. The product receives data from an HTTP agent/component (e.g., web server, proxy, browser, etc.), but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes CR and LF characters before the data is included in outgoing HTTP headers. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

A vulnerability in the Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a HTTP response splitting attack. The vulnerability is due to the failure of the application or its environment to properly sanitize input values. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by injecting malicious HTTP headers, controlling the response body, or splitting the response into multiple responses. An exploit could allow the attacker to perform cross-site scripting attacks, cross-user defacement, web cache poisoning, and similar exploits. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvf16705.

The bug was discovered 11/15/2017. The weakness was released 11/16/2017 with Cisco as cisco-sa-20171115-esa as confirmed advisory (Website). The advisory is shared at tools.cisco.com. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2017-12309 since 08/03/2017. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. No form of authentication is needed for exploitation. It demands that the victim is doing some kind of user interaction. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $5k-$25k at the moment (estimation calculated on 01/24/2021).

The vulnerability was handled as a non-public zero-day exploit for at least 1 days. During that time the estimated underground price was around $25k-$100k. The commercial vulnerability scanner Qualys is able to test this issue with plugin 316166 (Cisco Email Security Appliance and Content Security Management Appliance HTTP Response Splitting Vulnerability ( cisco-sa-20171115-esa)).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

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Type

• Anti-Malware Software

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• Cisco

Name

• Email Security Appliance

License

• commercial

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