Cisco Prime Infrastructure and Cisco Evolved Programmable Network Manager JSON Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

A vulnerability in the application programming interface (API) web interface of the Cisco Prime Infrastructure and Cisco Evolved Programmable Network Manager could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to perform privilege escalation on the affected device. The attacker can escalate privileges to the root level in most cases.

The vulnerability is due to incorrect role-based access control (RBAC) evaluation when a low-privileged user requests a web page or service that should be restricted. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by performing reconnaissance attacks to the application web pages and services to identify potential devices of interest. The attacker could then craft an HTTP request with a crafted JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) payload to request the targeted sensitive data. An exploit could allow the attacker to perform privilege escalation on the applications to the root level and access unauthorized data.

Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. Workarounds that address this vulnerability are not available.

This advisory is available at the following link: https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20160523-pi-epnm[“https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20160523-pi-epnm”]