CVE-2014-0679 in Prime Infrastructure
Summary
by MITRE
Cisco Prime Infrastructure 1.2 and 1.3 before 1.3.0.20-2, 1.4 before 1.4.0.45-2, and 2.0 before 2.0.0.0.294-2 allows remote authenticated users to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges via an unspecified URL, aka Bug ID CSCum71308.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 04/12/2025
Cisco Prime Infrastructure represents a critical network management platform that serves as a central hub for monitoring and managing enterprise networks. This vulnerability affects multiple versions of the software including 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 2.0 releases, indicating a widespread issue that could impact numerous enterprise deployments. The flaw manifests as an unauthorized command execution vulnerability that allows authenticated users to escalate their privileges to root level access, creating a severe security risk for network infrastructure management systems.
The technical nature of this vulnerability stems from an unspecified URL parameter that fails to properly validate user input or sanitize command execution paths. This type of flaw typically falls under CWE-77 and CWE-94 categories, representing command injection vulnerabilities where user-supplied data is directly incorporated into system commands without adequate security controls. The vulnerability specifically affects the authentication mechanism within the Prime Infrastructure platform, allowing an attacker who has already established legitimate credentials to leverage this weakness for privilege escalation.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends far beyond simple privilege escalation, as it provides attackers with complete administrative control over the network management system. With root privileges, malicious actors could modify network configurations, access sensitive operational data, disable security features, or establish persistent access points within the enterprise network. This vulnerability directly aligns with ATT&CK technique T1068 which describes local privilege escalation, and T1566 which covers credential harvesting and exploitation. The affected versions indicate that this vulnerability was present across multiple release branches, suggesting a fundamental flaw in the software architecture rather than a simple patchable issue.
Organizations utilizing Cisco Prime Infrastructure should immediately implement comprehensive mitigation strategies including applying the vendor-provided security patches for all affected versions, implementing network segmentation to limit access to the Prime Infrastructure system, and conducting thorough security audits of existing deployments. The vulnerability demonstrates the critical importance of input validation and privilege separation in enterprise network management systems, as it essentially provides a backdoor for authenticated users to bypass normal security controls and gain complete system control. Network administrators must also consider implementing additional monitoring and logging controls to detect potential exploitation attempts and establish more robust access control policies for privileged system accounts.