Cisco has addressed numerous vulnerabilities in its Nexus Dashboard. Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow attackers to conduct CSRF attacks or execute arbitrary code.
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Vulnerabilities
Elaborating on the security issues in a recent advisory, Cisco has confirmed patching three different vulnerabilities in the Nexus Dashboard.
Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard is a dedicated cloud network dashboard enabling users to monitor and manage the entire data center infrastructure operations. Unfortunately, these crucial functionalities also mean that any security flaws affecting this tool would directly risk the security of the relevant network.
Describing the impact of these vulnerabilities, the advisory reads,
Cisco Nexus Dashboard is deployed as a cluster, connecting each service node to two networks:
-Data network (fabric0, fabric1)
-Management network (mgmt0, mgmt1)
The scope of these exploits can be limited to the network interfaces that have exposure.
Specifically, Cisco has addressed the following three vulnerabilities in the tool.
- CVE-2022-20857 (critical severity; CVSS 9.8): insufficient access controls in a specific API allowed an unauthenticated, remote adversary to execute arbitrary codes on the target system. Exploiting the flaw merely required the attacker to send maliciously crafted HTTP requests to the API.
- CVE-2022-20861 (high-severity; CVSS 8.8.): poor CSRF protections in the Nexus Dashboard web UI allowed an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. An adversary could convince the target authenticated user to click on a maliciously crafted link to trigger the bug. Once done, the flaw would provide the attacker admin access to the system, empowering the attacker to perform any intended actions.
- CVE-2022-20858 (high-severity; CVSS 8.2): the service managing container images has poor access controls. Hence, an unauthenticated, remote adversary could trigger the flaw by opening a TCP connection to the vulnerable device. Once done, the adversary could then upload malicious container images or download the existing container images.
Patches Deployed
Cisco has addressed all three vulnerabilities with the Nexus Dashboard releases 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2. Besides, the vendors confirmed no viable workarounds for the flaws, urging users to update their systems at the earliest to stay safe.