Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager Privilege Escalation Vulnerability [CVE-2022-20732]

CVE number = CVE-2022-20732

A vulnerability in the configuration file protections of Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) could allow an authenticated, local attacker to access confidential information and elevate privileges on an affected device.

This vulnerability is due to improper access permissions for certain configuration files. An attacker with low-privileged credentials could exploit this vulnerability by accessing an affected device and reading the affected configuration files. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to obtain internal database credentials, which the attacker could use to view and modify the contents of the database. The attacker could use this access to the database to elevate privileges on the affected device.

Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability.

There are workarounds that address this vulnerability.

Vulnerable Products

This vulnerability affects Cisco VIM.

Workarounds

As a workaround, connect to the CLI of the affected device as root and secure the permissions of the affected file with the following command:

# chmod 600 /opt/cisco/mercury_restapi/app.conf

While this workaround has been deployed and was proven successful in a test environment, customers should determine the applicability and effectiveness in their own environment and under their own use conditions. Customers should be aware that any workaround or mitigation that is implemented may negatively impact the functionality or performance of their network based on intrinsic customer deployment scenarios and limitations. Customers should not deploy any workarounds or mitigations before first evaluating the applicability to their own environment and any impact to such environment.

This advisory is available at the following link:
https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-vim-privesc-T2tsFUf