A vulnerability in the High Availability (HA) service of Cisco Smart Software Manager On-Prem could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access a sensitive part of the system with a high-privileged account. The vulnerability is due to a system account that has a default and static password and is not under the control of the system administrator. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using this default account to connect to the affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to obtain read and write access to system data, including the configuration of an affected device. The attacker would gain access to a sensitive portion of the system, but the attacker would not have full administrative rights to control the device.
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key, which it uses for its own inbound authentication, outbound communication to external components, or encryption of internal data.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smart_software_manager_on-prem | Cisco | * | 7-202001 (excluding) |
Hard-coded credentials typically create a significant hole that allows an attacker to bypass the authentication that has been configured by the product administrator. This hole might be difficult for the system administrator to detect. Even if detected, it can be difficult to fix, so the administrator may be forced into disabling the product entirely. There are two main variations:
In the Inbound variant, a default administration account is created, and a simple password is hard-coded into the product and associated with that account. This hard-coded password is the same for each installation of the product, and it usually cannot be changed or disabled by system administrators without manually modifying the program, or otherwise patching the product. If the password is ever discovered or published (a common occurrence on the Internet), then anybody with knowledge of this password can access the product. Finally, since all installations of the product will have the same password, even across different organizations, this enables massive attacks such as worms to take place. The Outbound variant applies to front-end systems that authenticate with a back-end service. The back-end service may require a fixed password which can be easily discovered. The programmer may simply hard-code those back-end credentials into the front-end product. Any user of that program may be able to extract the password. Client-side systems with hard-coded passwords pose even more of a threat, since the extraction of a password from a binary is usually very simple.