CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-0281

Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information

Published: May 02, 2018 | Modified: Oct 09, 2019
CVSS 3.x
5.8
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A vulnerability in the detection engine of Cisco Firepower System Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to restart an instance of the Snort detection engine on an affected device, resulting in a brief denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to the incorrect handling of a Transport Layer Security (TLS) extension during TLS connection setup for the affected software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted TLS connection setup request to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the Snort detection engine on the affected device to restart, resulting in a DoS condition. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvg97808.

Weakness

The product transmits sensitive or security-critical data in cleartext in a communication channel that can be sniffed by unauthorized actors.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Firepower_management_center Cisco 6.1.0 (including) 6.1.0 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 6.2.0 (including) 6.2.0 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 6.2.1 (including) 6.2.1 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 6.2.2 (including) 6.2.2 (including)
Firepower_management_center Cisco 6.2.3 (including) 6.2.3 (including)

Extended Description

Many communication channels can be “sniffed” (monitored) by adversaries during data transmission. For example, in networking, packets can traverse many intermediary nodes from the source to the destination, whether across the internet, an internal network, the cloud, etc. Some actors might have privileged access to a network interface or any link along the channel, such as a router, but they might not be authorized to collect the underlying data. As a result, network traffic could be sniffed by adversaries, spilling security-critical data. Applicable communication channels are not limited to software products. Applicable channels include hardware-specific technologies such as internal hardware networks and external debug channels, supporting remote JTAG debugging. When mitigations are not applied to combat adversaries within the product’s threat model, this weakness significantly lowers the difficulty of exploitation by such adversaries. When full communications are recorded or logged, such as with a packet dump, an adversary could attempt to obtain the dump long after the transmission has occurred and try to “sniff” the cleartext from the recorded communications in the dump itself.

Potential Mitigations

References