Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches Application Centric Infrastructure Mode Root Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

A vulnerability in the filesystem management for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode Switch Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrator rights to gain elevated privileges as the root user on an affected device.

The vulnerability is due to overly permissive file permissions of specific system files. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to an affected device, creating a crafted command string, and writing this crafted string to a specific file location. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary operating system commands as root on an affected device. The attacker would need to have valid administrator credentials for the device.

Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

This advisory is available at the following link:
https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190501-nexus9k-rpe [“https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190501-nexus9k-rpe”]