CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-20217

Execution with Unnecessary Privileges

Published: Aug 16, 2023 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
5.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent, Virtual Appliance installation type, could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate privileges on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation by the operating system CLI. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by issuing certain commands using sudo. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to view arbitrary files as root on the underlying operating system. The attacker must have valid credentials on the affected device.

Weakness 

The product performs an operation at a privilege level that is higher than the minimum level required, which creates new weaknesses or amplifies the consequences of other weaknesses.

Affected Software 

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Thousandeyes_enterprise_agent Cisco * 0.230 (excluding)
Thousandeyes_recorder Cisco - (including) - (including)

Extended Description 

New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges. Privilege management functions can behave in some less-than-obvious ways, and they have different quirks on different platforms. These inconsistencies are particularly pronounced if you are transitioning from one non-root user to another. Signal handlers and spawned processes run at the privilege of the owning process, so if a process is running as root when a signal fires or a sub-process is executed, the signal handler or sub-process will operate with root privileges.

Potential Mitigations 

References