Vulnerabilities

Cisco Working on Patch for Publicly Disclosed IP Phone Vulnerability

Cisco informed customers on Thursday that it’s working on patches for a high-severity vulnerability affecting some of its IP phones.

Eduard Kovacs

December 9, 2022

Cisco informed customers on Thursday that it’s working on patches for a high-severity vulnerability affecting some of its IP phones.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-20968, impacts 7800 series and 8800 series (except 8821) Cisco IP phones. There are no workarounds, but Cisco did provide a mitigation that can be used until patches are released by the company.

CVE-2022-20968 has been described by the networking giant as a stack buffer overflow related to the Discovery Protocol processing feature.

An unauthenticated, adjacent attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending specially crafted Discovery Protocol packets to the targeted device. Exploitation can lead to arbitrary code execution or a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.

Cisco IP phones running firmware version 14.2 and earlier are impacted. A patch is scheduled for January 2023.

The company says it’s not aware of any malicious attacks exploiting the vulnerability, but noted that the flaw has been “publicly discussed” and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit is available.

SecurityWeek could not immediately find the PoC and public disclosure. However, the vulnerability was reported to Cisco by Qian Chen of Codesafe Team of Legendsec at Chinese cybersecurity firm Qi’anxin Group and the information might only be available in Chinese.

Qi’anxin researchers have reported vulnerabilities to several major software and hardware vendors over the past years, including Oracle, Moxa, HPE, Apple and Google.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing 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.

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