A vulnerability in the logic that handles access control to one of the hardware components in Ciscos proprietary Secure Boot implementation could allow an authenticated, local attacker to write a modified firmware image to the component. This vulnerability affects multiple Cisco products that support hardware-based Secure Boot functionality. The vulnerability is due to an improper check on the area of code that manages on-premise updates to a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) part of the Secure Boot hardware implementation. An attacker with elevated privileges and access to the underlying operating system that is running on the affected device could exploit this vulnerability by writing a modified firmware image to the FPGA. A successful exploit could either cause the device to become unusable (and require a hardware replacement) or allow tampering with the Secure Boot verification process, which under some circumstances may allow the attacker to install and boot a malicious software image. An attacker will need to fulfill all the following conditions to attempt to exploit this vulnerability: Have privileged administrative access to the device. Be able to access the underlying operating system running on the device; this can be achieved either by using a supported, documented mechanism or by exploiting another vulnerability that would provide an attacker with such access. Develop or have access to a platform-specific exploit. An attacker attempting to exploit this vulnerability across multiple affected platforms would need to research each one of those platforms and then develop a platform-specific exploit. Although the research process could be reused across different platforms, an exploit developed for a given hardware platform is unlikely to work on a different hardware platform.
The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asa_5500_firmware | Cisco | * | 1.1.15 (excluding) |
Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.