Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-0381 - Improper Locking vulnerability in Cisco Aironet Access Points

047910
CVSS 6.8 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
ADJACENT_NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
LOW
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
HIGH
low complexity
cisco
CWE-667
NVD
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2024-11-21

Summary

A vulnerability in the Cisco Aironet Series Access Points (APs) software could allow an authenticated, adjacent attacker to cause an affected device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to a deadlock condition that may occur when an affected AP attempts to dequeue aggregated traffic that is destined to an attacker-controlled wireless client. An attacker who can successfully transition between multiple Service Set Identifiers (SSIDs) hosted on the same AP while replicating the required traffic patterns could trigger the deadlock condition. A watchdog timer that detects the condition will trigger a reload of the device, resulting in a DoS condition while the device restarts.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
OS
Cisco
8

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Leveraging Race Conditions
    This attack targets a race condition occurring when multiple processes access and manipulate the same resource concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place. The attacker can leverage a race condition by "running the race", modifying the resource and modifying the normal execution flow. For instance a race condition can occur while accessing a file, the attacker can trick the system by replacing the original file with his version and cause the system to read the malicious file.
  • Leveraging Race Conditions via Symbolic Links
    This attack leverages the use of symbolic links (Symlinks) in order to write to sensitive files. An attacker can create a Symlink link to a target file not otherwise accessible to her. When the privileged program tries to create a temporary file with the same name as the Symlink link, it will actually write to the target file pointed to by the attackers' Symlink link. If the attacker can insert malicious content in the temporary file she will be writing to the sensitive file by using the Symlink. The race occurs because the system checks if the temporary file exists, then creates the file. The attacker would typically create the Symlink during the interval between the check and the creation of the temporary file.

References