ICS/OT

Rockwell Patches Stratix Switch Flaws Introduced by Cisco Software

Updates released this week by Rockwell Automation for its Allen-Bradley Stratix industrial switches patch several denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities introduced by the use of Cisco software.

Eduard Kovacs

April 5, 2019

Updates released this week by Rockwell Automation for its Allen-Bradley Stratix industrial switches patch several denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities introduced by the use of Cisco software.

Three separate advisories were published on Thursday by ICS-CERT and Rockwell Automation (only available to registered users) to describe the impact of the flaws on Stratix 5400, 5410, 5700, 8000, 8300, 5950, and ArmorStratix 5700 switches.

One advisory describes several high-severity vulnerabilities related to the Open Shortest Path First version 3 (OSPFv3), web framework, Precision Time Protocol (PTP), IPv6 processing, and Discovery Protocol components of Cisco IOS and IOS XE.

Allen-Bradley industrial switch Each of these flaws can be exploited by a remote or adjacent attacker, without authentication, to cause affected devices to reload and enter a DoS condition by sending it specially crafted packets.

A separate advisory has been published for a medium-severity flaw in the Cisco Network Plug and Play agent. This security hole can be exploited remotely without authentication to cause a device to reload by sending invalid data to the agent.

Rockwell Automation has fixed the vulnerabilities with the release of versions 15.2(6)E2a, 15.2(6)E0a, and 15.2(4)EA7. Cisco released patches for these issues in September 2018.

Learn More About ICS Flaws at SecurityWeek’s 2019 ICS Cyber Security Conference

A third advisory has been released for a high-severity vulnerability that Rockwell has yet to patch — Cisco addressed it in September 2018. This weakness can be exploited by a remote and unauthenticated attacker to cause a device to reload by sending it malicious IPsec packets.

While this is a serious vulnerability, Rockwell has pointed out that the IPsec feature is disabled by default in its Stratix 5950 security appliance, which is affected by the flaw. The company has advised customers to avoid using any IPsec VPN connections to prevent potential attacks.

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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