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Saturday 21 May 2022

Cisco IOS Router Exploitation - Client Side Vulnerabilities

 Cisco IOS suffers from client side vulnerabilities as much as any other network client software, probably even more so. However, the vulnerabilities identified in the past have rarely been even reported to Cisco PSIRT for fixing. The reason is probably that client side vulnerabilities are only useful to attackers if the client is actually used. And since it's likely that Cisco wouldn't care about client vulnerabilities, the incentive to report them is low.


Network engineers and support personal doesn't usually use Cisco IOS routers to access other services on the network. Accordingly, attackers can't exploit the vulnerabilities, even if they are known to them.

This situation might also change with the introduction of new functionality into Cisco IOS. It depends on the level of control an attacker can execute over the functionality on IOS remotely. If, for example, the attacker can cause an IOS router to connect to a third party HTTP server for any purpose (e.g. VoIP services), the whole range of vulnerabilities in HTTP client code becomes available as an attack vector.

But up until now, client side vulnerabilities have not played any role in Cisco IOS attacks.

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