SQLi vulnerability in Cacti could lead to RCE (CVE-2023-51448)

A blind SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2023-51448) in Cacti, a widely-used network monitoring, performance and fault management framework, could lead to information disclosure and potentially remote code execution.

Cacti is often used in network operation centers of telecoms and web hosting providers, to collect network performance data and store it in RRDtool, a logging and graphing database and system that, through a web interface, creates graphical representations of the collected data.

About CVE-2023-51448

CVE-2023-51448 is a vulnerability within Cacti’s SNMP Notification Receivers feature that could allow a threat actor to disclose all Cacti database contents or, depending on the database configuration, even trigger remote code execution (RCE).

“An authenticated attacker with the ‘Settings/Utilities’ permission can send a crafted HTTP GET request to the endpoint ‘/cacti/managers.php’ with an SQLi payload in the ‘selected_graphs_array’ HTTP GET parameter,” Cacti noted in the security advisory.

The Cacti maintainers have outlined a possible attack and say that a PoC script for testing it is available “upon request”.

The vulnerability, which affects versions 1.2.25, was discovered by Synopsys researcher Matthew Hogg and has been fixed by the maintainers in late December 2023.

Cacti servers in the crosshairs

A year ago, internet-exposed Cacti servers were targeted by attackers wielding an exploit for CVE-2022-46169, a critical command injection flaw that could be exploited remotely by unauthenticated users.

To exploit CVE-2023-51448, though, they must have access to an account with specific permissions or leverage another vulnerability to bypass the authentication requirement.

There is currently no indication that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. Cacti users are advised to upgrade to version 1.2.26, which fixed this and other vulnerabilities.