Series of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Could Endanger 200 Million Devices

Vulnerabilities in VxWorks' TCP stack could allow an attacker to execute random code, launch a DoS attack, or use the vulnerable system to attack other devices.

A series of vulnerabilities in a real-time operating system (RTOS) could leave up to 200 million devices open to exploit. And those devices include everything from network firewalls to medical devices. The vulnerabilities aren't theoretical — the exploits have been demonstrated — and many of the affected devices haven't been touched or actively managed in years.

A team of researchers from Armis found 11 critical zero-day vulnerabilities in VxWorks, a popular RTOS that has been in use since the late 1980s. The vulnerabilities, which include 6 remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, and 5 that are denial of service, information leak, or logical flaw vulnerabilities, are present in versions of the operating system that span more than 13 years.

The RCE vulnerabilities, which would allow an attacker to execute any code they choose on a vulnerable system, have an additional quality that makes them critical. "Normally, when a network vulnerability is exploited, the attack comes from inside the network," says Ben Seri, vice president of research at Armis. He points out that firewalls and other network edge devices are programmed to recognize and stop network vulnerability exploits that come from outside the network.

"In this case, an attacker can leverage a vulnerability to attack a device that's behind network address translation (NAT) and behind a firewall," Seri explains, because, "The vulnerability is in the TCP header itself. It traverses these devices without being stopped by the firewall."

The issue, he says, is that the contents of a packet can be encrypted to be protected from theft or corruption, but headers travel in clea ..

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