Overview
In the arena of cybersecurity, a new vulnerability has emerged that poses a serious threat to a prevailing operating system utilized by robots worldwide. This vulnerability, officially identified as CVE-2024-41921, is a code injection vulnerability specifically found in the ‘rostopic’ command-line tool of the Robot Operating System (ROS). This issue is of paramount importance as it potentially exposes ROS distributions, specifically Noetic Ninjemys and earlier, to a risk of system compromise or data leakage.
The significance of this vulnerability lies in its ability to let a local user craft and execute arbitrary code on the system, ultimately compromising the security of the system and possibly leading to the unauthorized extraction of sensitive data.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2024-41921
Severity: High, with a CVSS Severity Score of 7.8
Attack Vector: Local
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: Required
Impact: A successful exploit could result in system compromise and potential data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
Robot Operating System (ROS) | Noetic Ninjemys and earlier
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability exists in the ‘echo’ verb of the ‘rostopic’ command-line tool within ROS. This verb allows a user to introspect a ROS topic and accepts a Python expression from the user via the –filter option. Unfortunately, this input is passed directly to the eval() function without any form of sanitization.
This lack of sanitization means that a local user can craft a Python expression that executes arbitrary code when the eval() function is called. This could potentially compromise the entire system or lead to data leaks.
Conceptual Example Code
The following is a conceptual example of how the vulnerability might be exploited.
rostopic echo /rosout --filter="eval(__import__('os').system('malicious_command'))"In the above example, the –filter option is used to import the os module and execute a malicious command. This command could be anything from a simple system information query to a more harmful command like deleting files or uploading data to a remote server.
