16 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Discovered in CODESYS Affect Millions of Industrial Devices

CODESYS, a widely-used integrated environment for controller programming, holds a strong presence in Operational Technology across diverse industries, such as:-

• Factory automation
• Energy
• Mobile
• Building
• Embedded
• Process

Backed by more than 500 manufacturers (including Schnieder Electric, Beckhoff, Wago, Eaton, ABB, Festo, etc.) and spanning various architectures that we have mentioned below, CODESYS powers millions of global devices:-

• MIPS
• Renesas
• ARM
• PowerPC
• TriCore

Cybersecurity Researcher at Microsoft, Vladimir Eliezer Tokarev, recently identified several high-severity vulnerabilities and 16 zero-day vulnerabilities in CODESYS (CODESYS V3 SDK).

Besides this, Vladimir Eliezer Tokarev dubbed the 16 zero-day vulnerabilities that he found in CODESYS as “CoDe16,” a code name for this complete set of CODESYS zero-day vulnerabilities.

While the OT infrastructure could be affected severely by successfully exploiting all these high-severity vulnerabilities discovered in CODESYS V3 SDK.

Moreover, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team also prompted and recommended that users at the BHUSA event (Black Hat USA 2023) attend their official session related to this vulnerability profile on August 10.

BHUSA Event Session

Cybersecurity researchers will detail the following key things during this event session:-

• Exciting findings
• Share technical insights into vulnerability discovery
• Firmware extraction
• Analysis

Apart from this, all the challenges, like proprietary network protocols and debugger-free analysis, will also be explored.

Security analysts will also unveil the root-cause for key flaws, and demonstrate the remote code execution chain to implant malicious payload, gaining full PLC control and factory floor manipulation.

Closing remarks will include the mitigation strategies, an open-source validation tool for CODESYS devices, and a live demo of successful RCE on an exposed system.