A vulnerability was found in Cisco NX-OS on Nexus 9000 (Router Operating System) (version now known) and classified as critical. This issue affects some unknown processing of the component ACI Mode. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a access control vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-264. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

A vulnerability in the filesystem management for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode Switch Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrator rights to gain elevated privileges as the root user on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to overly permissive file permissions of specific system files. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to an affected device, creating a crafted command string, and writing this crafted string to a specific file location. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary operating system commands as root on an affected device. The attacker would need to have valid administrator credentials for the device.

The bug was discovered 05/01/2019. The weakness was disclosed 05/03/2019 as cisco-sa-20190501-nexus9k-rpe as confirmed advisory (Website). The advisory is shared at tools.cisco.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2019-1803 since 12/06/2018. An attack has to be approached locally. Required for exploitation is a simple authentication. 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 09/12/2023). MITRE ATT&CK project uses the attack technique T1068 for this issue.

The vulnerability was handled as a non-public zero-day exploit for at least 2 days. During that time the estimated underground price was around $5k-$25k. The commercial vulnerability scanner Qualys is able to test this issue with plugin 316433 (Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches Application Centric Infrastructure Mode Multiple Vulnerabilities (cisco-sa-20190501-aci-insecure-fabric) (cisco-sa-20190501-aci-hw-clock-util)(cisco-sa-20190501-nexus9k-rpe)).

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

The entries VDB-134334 and VDB-134335 are pretty similar. If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

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Type

• Router Operating System

Vendor

• Cisco

Name

• NX-OS

License

• commercial

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• 🔍

CPE 2.2info

• 🔍

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