Cisco on Wednesday announced patches for multiple vulnerabilities in IOS RX software, including three high-severity flaws leading to denial-of-service (DoS) and elevation of privilege.
The most severe of the high-severity bugs is CVE-2024-20320, an issue in the SSH feature of IOS RX that could allow attackers to elevate privileges to root by sending crafted SSH commands to the CLI.
Impacting 8000 series routers and Network Convergence System (NCS) 540 series and 5700 series routers, the security hole was patched with the release of IOS RX version 7.10.2. Devices running older iterations of the operating system should be upgraded to the patched release.
The second high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-20318, impacts line cards that have the Layer 2 services feature enabled. An attacker could send specific Ethernet frames through a vulnerable device to cause the line card network processor to reset and could repeat the process to reset the line card, causing a DoS condition.
The vulnerability was addressed in IOS RX software releases 7.9.2 and 7.10.1. Cisco also released software maintenance upgrades (SMUs) that resolve the bug.
The tech giant also patched CVE-2024-20327, a high-severity DoS bug impacting the PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) termination feature of ASR 9000 series routers. Improper handling of malformed PPPoE packets allows an attacker to crash the ppp_ma process, causing a DoS condition for PPPoE traffic.
The issue, Cisco says, impacts routers “running Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) functionality with PPPoE termination on a Lightspeed-based or Lightspeed-Plus-based line card”. IOS RX software releases 7.9.21, 7.10.1, and 7.11.1 contain patches for this flaw.
On Wednesday, Cisco also announced fixes for several medium-severity vulnerabilities in IOS XR software that could allow attackers to bypass protections, cause a DoS condition, or install unverified software images.
The flaws were addressed as part of Cisco’s March 2024 semiannual IOS RX security advisories bundle, which includes eight advisories.
The tech giant makes no mention of any of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild. Additional information can be found on Cisco’s security advisories page.
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