Security News > 2020 > February > Cisco Discovery Protocol Flaws Expose Tens of Millions of Devices to Attacks

Tens of millions of Cisco devices deployed in enterprise environments are exposed to attacks due to vulnerabilities identified by researchers in a proprietary discovery protocol they all use.

The problematic protocol is the Cisco Discovery Protocol, a Layer 2 network protocol used to obtain information about Cisco devices present on the local network.

The code execution flaws impact the NX-OS, IOS XR, IP phone, and IP camera implementations, while the DoS issue affects the FXOS, IOS XR and NX-OS implementations of CDP. In order to exploit the weaknesses, an attacker who has gained access to the network needs to send specially crafted CDP packets to the targeted device.

Armis says, compromising a switch using a CDPwn attack can allow hackers to intercept network traffic and launch man-in-the-middle attacks.

"Additionally, a switch is the ultimate hiding position for an attacker - it is an relatively unsecured device, that doesn't allow any security agent on it, and an attacker has the ability to launch attacks from it to the devices in the network. An attacker could also hide the malicious traffic he generated from any other network taps that are there to inspect traffic," Armis explained in its report on CDPwn.

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