Cisco has released software updates for its ACE 4710 appliance to address a high severity command injection vulnerability.
The Cisco ACE 4710 Application Control Engine appliance is designed to enhance application availability and performance, and help organizations secure their data center and critical applications against attacks. The solution is no longer sold since January 2014, but it’s still supported until January 31, 2019.
According to an advisory published by the company on Wednesday, the product’s Device Manager GUI is plagued by an insufficient user input validation vulnerability that can be exploited by a remote, authenticated attacker to execute any command-line interface commands with administrator privileges.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-1297, can be exploited by sending a specially crafted HTTP POST request with commands injected into the value of the POST parameter. A malicious actor can leverage the flaw to bypass role-based access control (RBAC) restrictions, Cisco said.
The vulnerability affects appliances running A5 software versions up to A5(3.0) if access to the Device Manager GUI is allowed. Cisco patched the flaw with the release of versions A5(3.3), A5(3.2), A5(3.1b), A5(3.1a) and A5(3.1).
Customers who cannot immediately apply the patch can protect themselves against potential attacks by disabling access to the Device Manager GUI.
The vulnerability was reported to Cisco by Jan Kadijk of Warpnet BV. The vendor says there is no evidence that the flaw has been exploited in the wild.
Cisco has published tens of advisories this year describing vulnerabilities in its products, but most of them are for issues rated medium severity. Critical and high severity bugs have been found this year in industrial switches, Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), Nexus 9000 switches, Cisco Prime Security Manager (PRSM), and Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software.