CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20217 — Cisco Thousandeyes Enterprise Agent security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent, Virtual Appliance installation type, could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate privileges on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation by the operating system CLI. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by issuing certain commands using sudo. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to view arbitrary files as root on the underlying operating system. The attacker must have valid credentials on the affected device.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-08-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-250

Affected products

  • cisco / thousandeyes_enterprise_agent
  • cisco / thousandeyes_recorder

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

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Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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