Back

HIGH

Use of a hard-coded cryptographic key pair by the telnetd_startup service allows an attacker on the local area network to obtain a root shell on the device over telnet

Published Mar 7, 2022

Description

Use of a hard-coded cryptographic key pair by the telnetd_startup service allows an attacker on the local area network to obtain a root shell on the device over telnet. The builds of telnetd_startup included in the version 22.5.9.163 of the K2 firmware, and version 32.1.15.93 of the K3C firmware (possibly amongst many other releases) included both the private and public RSA keys. The remaining versions cited here redacted the private key, but left the public key unchanged. An attacker in possession of the leaked private key may, through a scripted exchange of UDP packets, instruct telnetd_startup to spawn an unauthenticated telnet shell as root, by means of which they can then obtain complete control of the device. A consequence of the limited availablility of firmware images for testing is that models and versions not listed here may share this vulnerability.

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Metrics

References (1)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner tenable
Published Mar 7, 2022
Updated Aug 3, 2024
Reserved Feb 15, 2022
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity n/a
Public date n/a