Cisco has launched a brand new safety advisory warning of a high-severity flaw affecting IP Cellphone 7800 and 8800 Collection firmware that might be probably exploited by a distant attacker to trigger distant code execution or a denial-of-service (DoS) situation.
The networking tools main stated it is engaged on a patch to handle the vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2022-20968 (CVSS rating: 8.1) and stems from a case of inadequate enter validation of obtained Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) packets.
CDP is a proprietary network-independent protocol that’s used for accumulating info associated to close by, straight related gadgets corresponding to {hardware}, software program, and machine title, amongst others. It is enabled by default.
“An attacker may exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted Cisco Discovery Protocol site visitors to an affected machine,” the corporate stated in an alert revealed on December 8, 2022.
“A profitable exploit may enable the attacker to trigger a stack overflow, leading to potential distant code execution or a denial of service (DoS) situation on an affected machine.”
Cisco IP telephones operating firmware model 14.2 and earlier are impacted. A patch is scheduled for launch in January 2023, with the corporate stating that there aren’t any updates or workarounds to remediate the difficulty.
Nonetheless, on deployments that help each CDP and Hyperlink Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) for neighbor discovery, customers can decide to disable CDP in order that the affected gadgets swap to LLDP for promoting their identification and capabilities to straight related friends in an area space community (LAN).
“This isn’t a trivial change and would require diligence on behalf of the enterprise to judge any potential influence to gadgets in addition to the very best method to deploy this alteration of their enterprise,” the corporate stated.
It additional warned that it is conscious of the supply of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit and that the shortcoming has been publicly disclosed. There isn’t any proof that the vulnerability has been actively abused within the wild thus far.
Qian Chen from the Codesafe Workforce of Legendsec at Qi’anxin Group has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability.
