Almost a dozen serious vulnerabilities have been sitting for the past 13 years in the VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) used to power mission-critical embedded devices.
Built and maintained by Wind River, VxWorks is designed to serve computing needs in the critical infrastructure where low latency in data processing is an absolute requirement.
According to Wind River, more than two billion embedded systems rely on its RTOS operating system and is trusted by top-tier organizations from various industry segments: defense, security, aerospace, robotics, engineering, industrial automation, and even solar system exploration (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
VxWorks used in critical systems
Systems such as SCADA, elevator and industrial controllers, patient monitors, and MRI machines, firewalls, routers, satellite modems, VOIP phones, and printers likely impacted.
An adversary exploiting the glitches could take over the affected devices without any interaction from the user. More worryingly, network-level security solutions like firewalls and NAT systems cannot stop the attack. This happens because the packets sent during the attack look like non-threatening network communication.
Below is a video demonstrating how the researchers were able to take over SonicWall firewall. According to a search Armis did on Shodan, there are over 800,000 reachable over the internet.
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Due to this, the researchers say that these faults could have similar consequences as the EternalBlue and WannaCry attacks, which allowed a malware to spread throughout a company's global network.
The Armis Labs research team discovered 11 vulnerabilities affecting a different part of IPnet, the TCP/IP stack in VxWorks. Researchers refer to the collection as 'URGENT/11' with some of the bugs affect different versions of the OS, the earliest one being ..
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