Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-28846 - Use of Externally-Controlled Format String vulnerability in Trendnet products

047910
CVSS 6.5 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
LOW
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
HIGH
network
low complexity
trendnet
CWE-134

Summary

A Format String vulnerablity exists in TRENDnet TEW-755AP 1.11B03, TEW-755AP2KAC 1.11B03, TEW-821DAP2KAC 1.11B03, and TEW-825DAP 1.11B03, which could let a remote malicious user cause a denial of service due to a logic bug at address 0x40dcd0 when calling fprintf with "%s: key len = %d, too long\n" format. The two variables seem to be put in the wrong order. The vulnerability could be triggered by sending the POST request to apply_cgi with a long and unknown key in the request body.

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Format String Injection
    An attacker includes formatting characters in a string input field on the target application. Most applications assume that users will provide static text and may respond unpredictably to the presence of formatting character. For example, in certain functions of the C programming languages such as printf, the formatting character %s will print the contents of a memory location expecting this location to identify a string and the formatting character %n prints the number of DWORD written in the memory. An attacker can use this to read or write to memory locations or files, or simply to manipulate the value of the resulting text in unexpected ways. Reading or writing memory may result in program crashes and writing memory could result in the execution of arbitrary code if the attacker can write to the program stack.
  • String Format Overflow in syslog()
    This attack targets the format string vulnerabilities in the syslog() function. An attacker would typically inject malicious input in the format string parameter of the syslog function. This is a common problem, and many public vulnerabilities and associated exploits have been posted.