Critical Vulnerabilities Dubbed URGENT/11 Place Devices Running VxWorks at Risk of RCE Attacks

Eleven vulnerabilities, including RCEs, denials of service, information leaks and logical flaws, were recently disclosed, impacting the RTOS VxWorks

Background

The Armis Research Team has released an advisory for URGENT/11, which contains six critical RCE and five additional vulnerabilities in VxWorks, a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) found in over 2 billion devices, including critical industrial, medical and enterprise hardware. Wind River, the maintainer of VxWorks, released patches on July 19 for all 11 of the vulnerabilities.

분석

VxWorks is an RTOS found in a wide array of devices like firewalls, medical equipment and industrial control systems. The vulnerabilities found affect VxWorks’ TCP/IP stack (IPnet) and could allow attackers to circumvent Network Address Translation (NAT) and Firewalls via maliciously crafted IP packets. Wind River acquired the IPnet networking stack in 2006. Prior to this, the stack was licensed and used by other real-time operating system vendors, which potentially widens the number of affected devices that have yet to be patched. The scale and potential impact of these vulnerabilities create similar threats on par with the likes of WannaCry and ETERNALBLUE.

The following video from Armis provides an overview of URGENT/11 and its potential impact:

From Wind River's URGENT/11 security advisory, the following vulnerabilities and their respective details are:

Proof of Concept

While no Proof of Concept (PoC) code has been released for these vulnerabilities, the Armis team has provided two videos demonstrating how an attacker could compromise internal assets from other internet-facing devices:

Solution

Organizations and individual users will need to apply updates from their respective device vendors in order to fix these vulnerabilities within their environments. Vendors like SonicWall and Xerox have reportedly released updates for their affected devices. Detection and mitigation may take some time, however, given the  sheer magnitude of the number of devices utilizing VxWorks.

Tenable will add active and passive plugins as patches and updates become available from different vendors. Our OS Identification plugin can enumerate hosts running VxWorks, which will be available in the plugin output section in the scan results for a given asset. Tenable Nessus Network Monitor (NNM) currently offers multiple VxWorks detection plugins, and proactively detects assets that may be running vulnerable versions of VxWorks.

For users seeking guidance on configuring NNM and creating useful notifications for VxWorks devices, please see our NNM configuration and usage documentation or reach out to our support team at https://support.tenable.com.

Identifying affected systems

A list of plugins to identify these vulnerabilities will appear here as they’re released. Please note that vulnerability detection plugin creation also relies on vendor support for any given device. We encourage organizations to examine the plugin output section of our informational detection plugins in their scan results to identify vulnerable systems in addition to scanning with direct vulnerability detection plugins.

Get more information

• Armis Research Vulnerability Disclosure
• Wind River Vulnerability Advisory
• SonicWall Vulnerability Advisory
• Wikipedia List of Notable VxWorks Utilization
• Live list of URGENT/11 plugins

Join Tenable's Security Response Team on the Tenable Community.

Learn more about Tenable, the first Cyber Exposure platform for holistic management of your modern attack surface.

Get a free 60-day trial of Tenable.io.