Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence and research unit has identified several critical vulnerabilities in a widely used industrial cellular IoT gateway made by Chinese company Robustel.
The affected product is the R1510 router, which is designed to provide high-speed wireless network bandwidth in harsh environments. The device has been used worldwide and it has been certified by more than 20 mobile network operators in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia.
Talos told SecurityWeek that the vendor patched the vulnerabilities while its researchers were still investigating. However, Robustel did not release a security advisory and it did not assign CVE identifiers to the flaws.
Patches for the security holes found by Talos are included in version 3.1.16. However, Talos conducted its analysis in April on version 3.3.0, which at the time had been the latest available release. It’s possible that the vendor has made some changes to its version numbering.
Talos researchers have discovered a total of ten vulnerabilities in the R1510 industrial router. Nine of the flaws have been described as command injection issues that can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands by sending specially crafted network requests to the targeted device. These flaws have been assigned a “critical” severity rating.
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The remaining vulnerability, rated “high severity”, is a data removal issue that can be exploited using specially crafted network requests to delete arbitrary files.
Cisco has published technical details for each type of vulnerability.
Yves Younan, senior manager of Talos Systems Security Research, pointed out that an attacker needs an administrator account on the device to exploit the vulnerabilities.
“If an attacker has an administrator account on the device, they could escalate their privileges to gain complete control of the device, which allows them to monitor traffic passing through the device and attack devices that are behind the device that may not otherwise be reachable,” Younan explained.
The expert said that while some devices could be accessible from the internet, exposure depends on how they are deployed.
“If they are deployed as 4G routers, they would typically be behind NAT from the mobile provider so exposure might be more limited,” he noted.
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