A vulnerability in the device manager web interface of Cisco Industrial Ethernet Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack against a user of an affected system. The vulnerability is due to insufficient CSRF protection by the device manager web interface. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by persuading a user of the interface to follow a malicious link or visit an attacker-controlled website. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to submit arbitrary requests to an affected device via the device manager web interface with the privileges of the user. This vulnerability affects the following Cisco Industrial Ethernet (IE) Switches if they are running a vulnerable release of Cisco IOS Software: IE 2000 Series, IE 2000U Series, IE 3000 Series, IE 3010 Series, IE 4000 Series, IE 4010 Series, IE 5000 Series. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvc96405.
Weakness
The web application does not, or can not, sufficiently verify whether a well-formed, valid, consistent request was intentionally provided by the user who submitted the request.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Ios |
Cisco |
15.2(5)e (including) |
15.2(5)e (including) |
Potential Mitigations
- Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
- For example, use anti-CSRF packages such as the OWASP CSRFGuard. [REF-330]
- Another example is the ESAPI Session Management control, which includes a component for CSRF. [REF-45]
- Use the “double-submitted cookie” method as described by Felten and Zeller:
- When a user visits a site, the site should generate a pseudorandom value and set it as a cookie on the user’s machine. The site should require every form submission to include this value as a form value and also as a cookie value. When a POST request is sent to the site, the request should only be considered valid if the form value and the cookie value are the same.
- Because of the same-origin policy, an attacker cannot read or modify the value stored in the cookie. To successfully submit a form on behalf of the user, the attacker would have to correctly guess the pseudorandom value. If the pseudorandom value is cryptographically strong, this will be prohibitively difficult.
- This technique requires Javascript, so it may not work for browsers that have Javascript disabled. [REF-331]
References