A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco AsyncOS for Secure Web Appliance could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands and elevate privileges to root. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input for the CLI. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to the system and executing a crafted command on the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system and elevate privileges to root. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need at least guest credentials.
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.
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.