Cacti Blind SQL Injection Flaw Enables Remote Code Execution

Cacti, the performance and fault management framework, has been discovered with a blind SQL injection vulnerability, which could reveal Cacti database contents or trigger remote code execution. 

The CVE for this vulnerability has been assigned with CVE-2023-51448, and the severity has been given as 8.8 (High).

This vulnerability existed due to insufficient sanitization of a parameter. However, Cacti has swiftly upon this vulnerability and patched this vulnerability.

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Cacti Blind SQL Injection Flaw

An authenticated threat actor with any account that has the privilege to “Settings/Utilities” could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP GET request to the “/managers.php” endpoint, which could result in the SQLi payload being executed.

The parameter is vulnerable to this SQL injection attack has been identified as ‘selected_graph_array.’

According to the reports shared with Cyber Security News, this vulnerability arises due to the function ‘form_actions’ in the file ‘managers.php.’ In addition to this, the ‘get_nfilter_request_var’ does not perform sanitization when deserializing the provided value. 

It was also stated that the ‘cacti_unserialize’ function uses the ‘allowed_classes’ argument to remove any PHP Object Injection vectors but does not perform any sanitization on the deserialized value.

Hence, the flow of this attack would start with the attacker sending a serialized array which has the SQLi payload deserialized to an in-memory array followed by joining it into a single string and concatenating it into a raw SQL query—this query, when executed in the database, results in exposing sensitive information.

Moreover, the impact of this vulnerability may vary based on the configuration of the Cacti database, which could even result in arbitrary file reading and writing.

Furthermore, this vulnerability can also be escalated to Remote code execution, as demonstrated in another vulnerability, CVE-2023-49084. 

Users of Cacti are recommended to upgrade to the patched version to prevent this vulnerability from getting exploited by threat actors.