Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Network Security

Unpatched Cisco Autonomic Networking Flaws Disclosed at Black Hat

Cisco published advisories on Wednesday to inform users of several unpatched vulnerabilities affecting the Autonomic Networking feature of it IOS and IOS XE software. The flaws, some of which rated “high severity,” were disclosed this week by a researcher at the Black Hat security conference.

Cisco published advisories on Wednesday to inform users of several unpatched vulnerabilities affecting the Autonomic Networking feature of it IOS and IOS XE software. The flaws, some of which rated “high severity,” were disclosed this week by a researcher at the Black Hat security conference.

Omar Eissa, an analyst at Germany-based security firm ERNW, disclosed the weaknesses as part of a briefing titled “Network Automation is Not Your Safe Haven: Protocol Analysis and Vulnerabilities of Autonomic Network.”

One of the vulnerabilities rated by Cisco high severity, CVE-2017-6663, allows an unauthenticated attacker on the network to cause autonomic nodes to reload and generate a denial-of-service (DoS) condition by capturing packets and replaying them to reset the Autonomic Control Plane (ACP) channel of the affected system.

The researcher noted in his presentation at Black Hat that it takes roughly 15 minutes to crash a device by exploiting this vulnerability.

The second high severity flaw, classified as an information disclosure issue and tracked as CVE-2017-6665, allows an unauthenticated attacker to capture and view ACP packets that are sent in clear text instead of being encrypted. The root cause of these security holes is unknown, Cisco said.

A third vulnerability, rated medium severity, allows a remote, unauthenticated autonomic node to access the Autonomic Networking infrastructure of an impacted systems after the certificate for that node has been revoked.

The vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS and IOS XE software if Autonomic Networking is enabled on the device. Patches have yet to be released for these weaknesses and Cisco says there are no workarounds. The networking giant is not aware of any attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities.

This is not the first time Eissa has disclosed Cisco Autonomic Networking flaws at a security conference. A few months ago, at an event in Germany called TROOPERS, he disclosed a couple of high severity DoS vulnerabilities. However, Cisco had patched those before the researcher’s disclosure.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Related: Cisco Patches CIA Zero-Day Affecting Hundreds of Switches

Related: Cisco Warns of Serious Flaws in IOS Software

Related: Rockwell Updates Stratix Routers to Patch Cisco IOS Flaws

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Identity & Access

Zero trust is not a replacement for identity and access management (IAM), but is the extension of IAM principles from people to everyone and...

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

IoT Security

A group of seven security researchers have discovered numerous vulnerabilities in vehicles from 16 car makers, including bugs that allowed them to control car...

Vulnerabilities

A researcher at IOActive discovered that home security systems from SimpliSafe are plagued by a vulnerability that allows tech savvy burglars to remotely disable...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.