Cisco Nexus Operating System Devices Command Line Interface Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

A vulnerability in the Command Line Interface (CLI) parser of Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) devices could allow an authenticated, local attacker to perform a privilege escalation.

The vulnerability is due to improper input validation of special characters within filenames. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating at the local shell and writing a file to disk with certain special characters. The attacker could then use that file with other CLI commands to obtain a shell prompt at their current privilege level. An exploit could allow the attacker to read and write files and perform other privileged commands.

Cisco has confirmed the vulnerability; however, software updates are not available.

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must have local access and be able to authenticate to the targeted device. These requirements could limit the possibility of a successful exploit.

Cisco would like to thank Jens Krabbenhoeft for discovering and reporting this vulnerability.