A vulnerability in the Remote Package Manager (RPM) subsystem of Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrator credentials to leverage a time-of-check, time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition to corrupt local variables, which could lead to arbitrary command injection. The vulnerability is due to the lack of a proper locking mechanism on critical variables that need to stay static until used. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to an affected device and issuing a set of RPM-related CLI commands. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform arbitrary command injection. The attacker would need administrator credentials for the targeted device.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nx-os | Cisco | 7.0(3)i4 (including) | 7.0(3)i7(4) (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.