CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-20821

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: May 26, 2022 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
6.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
CVSS 2.x
6.4 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A vulnerability in the health check RPM of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access the Redis instance that is running within the NOSi container. This vulnerability exists because the health check RPM opens TCP port 6379 by default upon activation. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the Redis instance on the open port. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to write to the Redis in-memory database, write arbitrary files to the container filesystem, and retrieve information about the Redis database. Given the configuration of the sandboxed container that the Redis instance runs in, a remote attacker would be unable to execute remote code or abuse the integrity of the Cisco IOS XR Software host system.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
8201 Cisco - (including) - (including)
8202 Cisco - (including) - (including)
8208 Cisco - (including) - (including)
8212 Cisco - (including) - (including)
8218 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a1-24h Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a1-24q6h-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a1-36h-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a1-36h-se Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a1-36h-se-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a2-mod-hd-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a2-mod-hx-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a2-mod-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a2-mod-se-h-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs-55a2-mod-se-s Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_1001 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_1002 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_1004 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5001 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5002 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5501-se Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5502-se Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5504 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5508 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_5516 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_55a1 Cisco - (including) - (including)
Ncs_55a2 Cisco - (including) - (including)

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References