Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches Application Centric Infrastructure Mode Root Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

published 2019-05-03 7 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-10360

cvss: 7.8; version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.3%; EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 24%
public exploits: 0; none known

A vulnerability in the filesystem management for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode Switch Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrator rights to gain elevated privileges as the root user on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to overly permissive file permissions of specific system files. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to an affected device, creating a crafted command string, and writing this crafted string to a specific file location. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary operating system commands as root on an affected device. The attacker would need to have valid administrator credentials for the device.

Patch / fix

fixed in 1

Cisco Cisco NX-OS Software for Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode 14.1(1i)

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical impact: total
Assessed: 23 mo ago (2024-11-20)

Exploit prediction

0.32% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 24% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	3.0	7.8	CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD	3.1	6.7	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD	2.0	7.2	AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Affected products

Cisco Cisco NX-OS Software for Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode

Classification

Weakness

CWE-264 Permissions, Privileges, and Access Controls
CWE-732 Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource

References

tools.cisco.com /security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190501-nexus9k-rpe
vendor-advisory

Sources

CVE List CVE-2019-1803
NVD CVE-2019-1803

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Summary