Artem Kondratenko

Year 2017 was rich in vulnerabilities discovered for Cisco networking devices. At least 3 vulnerabilities leading to a remote code execution were disclosed. This talk will give an insight on exploit development process for Cisco IOS for two of the mentioned critical vulnerabilities. Both lead to a full takeover of the target device. Both PowerPC and MIPS architectures will be covered. The presentation will feature an SNMP server exploitation demo.

On March 17th, Cisco Systems Inc. made a public announcement that over 300 of the switches it manufactures are prone to a critical vulnerability that allows a potential attacker to take full control of the network equipment. This damaging public announcement was preceded by Wikileaks' publication of documents codenamed as "Vault 7" which contained information on vulnerabilities and description of tools needed to access phones, network equipment and even IOT devices. Cisco Systems Inc. had a huge task in front of them - patching this vast amount of different switch models is not an easy task. The remediation for this vulnerability was available with the initial advisory and patched versions of IOS software were announced on May 8th 2017. I decided to reproduce the steps necessary to create a fully working tool to get remote code execution on Cisco switches mentioned in the public announcement. Another big vulnerability was disclosed in June 2017. This was a remote code execution vulnerability in an SNMP service affecting multiple Cisco routers and switches. I will share the techniques and tools I used while researching vulnerable Cisco switches and routers. Reverse engineering and debugging IOS under PowerPC and MIPS architectures will be the focus of this talk. We all heard about modern exploit mitigation techniques such as Data Execution Prevention, Layout Randomization. But just how hardened is the network equipment? And how hard is it to find critical vulnerabilities in network devices?