CVE-2015-8255 in Product
Summary
by MITRE
AXIS Communications products allow CSRF, as demonstrated by admin/pwdgrp.cgi, vaconfig.cgi, and admin/local_del.cgi.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 07/26/2024
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2015-8255 affects AXIS Communications network video surveillance products and represents a critical cross-site request forgery flaw that enables unauthorized administrative actions through manipulated web requests. This vulnerability specifically impacts several administrative CGI scripts including admin/pwdgrp.cgi for password group management, vaconfig.cgi for video analytics configuration, and admin/local_del.cgi for local file deletion operations. The flaw arises from the absence of proper request validation mechanisms that would normally verify the authenticity and origin of administrative requests within the web interface of these security devices.
The technical implementation of this CSRF vulnerability stems from the lack of anti-forgery tokens or other validation mechanisms in the affected CGI scripts. When an authenticated administrator interacts with the AXIS device's web interface, the system should validate that requests originate from legitimate administrative sessions. However, the vulnerable implementations fail to perform these validations, allowing attackers to craft malicious web pages or exploit existing user sessions to execute unauthorized administrative commands. This occurs because the affected scripts do not require or verify the presence of CSRF tokens, session identifiers, or referer header validation that would normally prevent such attacks from succeeding.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe and multifaceted within network security environments. An attacker who can access the web interface of an affected AXIS device could potentially perform administrative actions without proper authentication, including changing user credentials, modifying system configurations, deleting critical files, or altering video analytics parameters. This represents a significant escalation from standard user access to full administrative control, effectively compromising the entire security infrastructure that the device is designed to protect. The vulnerability particularly affects environments where these devices are deployed in corporate networks, surveillance systems, or security-critical applications where unauthorized access could result in complete system compromise and data exposure.
From a cybersecurity perspective, this vulnerability aligns with CWE-352, which specifically addresses Cross-Site Request Forgery issues, and maps to ATT&CK technique T1078.004 for Valid Accounts and T1566.001 for Phishing. The attack vector typically involves social engineering or session hijacking to trick authenticated users into visiting malicious pages that automatically submit requests to the vulnerable AXIS device. Organizations should implement immediate mitigations including applying vendor patches, implementing network segmentation to restrict access to administrative interfaces, deploying web application firewalls, and ensuring that administrative interfaces are not directly accessible from untrusted networks. Additionally, regular security assessments of networked security devices and enforcement of principle of least privilege access controls are essential to prevent exploitation of similar vulnerabilities in other networked equipment. The vulnerability demonstrates the critical importance of input validation and request authenticity verification in web-based administrative interfaces of security appliances.