Researchers Discover LG Smart TV Vulnerabilities Allowing Root Access

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in LG webOS running on its smart televisions that could be exploited to bypass authorization and gain root access on the devices.

The findings come from Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender, which discovered and reported the flaws in November 2023. The issues were fixed by LG as part of updates released on March 22, 2024.

The vulnerabilities are tracked from CVE-2023-6317 through CVE-2023-6320 and impact the following versions of webOS -

• webOS 4.9.7 - 5.30.40 running on LG43UM7000PLA
• webOS 5.5.0 - 04.50.51 running on OLED55CXPUA
• webOS 6.3.3-442 (kisscurl-kinglake) - 03.36.50 running on OLED48C1PUB
• webOS 7.3.1-43 (mullet-mebin) - 03.33.85 running on OLED55A23LA

A brief description of the shortcomings is as follows -

• CVE-2023-6317 - A vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass PIN verification and add a privileged user profile to the TV set without requiring user interaction
• CVE-2023-6318 - A vulnerability that allows the attacker to elevate their privileges and gain root access to take control of the device
• CVE-2023-6319 - A vulnerability that allows operating system command injection by manipulating a library named asm that’s responsible for showing music lyrics
• CVE-2023-6320 - A vulnerability that allows for the injection of authenticated commands by manipulating the com.webos.service.connectionmanager/tv/setVlanStaticAddress API endpoint

Successful exploitation of the flaws could allow a threat actor to gain elevated permissions to the device, which, in turn, can be chained with CVE-2023-6318 and CVE-2023-6319 to obtain root access, or with CVE-2023-6320 to run arbitrary commands as the dbus user.

“Although the vulnerable service is intended for LAN access only, Shodan, the search engine for Internet-connected devices, identified over 91,000 devices that expose this service to the Internet,” Bitdefender said. A majority of the devices are located in South Korea, Hong Kong, the U.S., Sweden, Finland, and Latvia.

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