CVE-2023-1389

CVE-2023-1389 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) vulnerability in TP-Link Archer AX21. CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on May 1, 2023, which means exploitation in the wild has been confirmed; US federal agencies had to remediate it by May 22, 2023. CISA does not currently list it as used in ransomware campaigns. TP-Link has 6 vulnerabilities in the KEV catalog, 0 of them linked to ransomware.

TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) firmware versions before 1.1.4 Build 20230219 contained a command injection vulnerability in the country form of the /cgi-bin/luci;stok=/locale endpoint on the web management interface. Specifically, the country parameter of the write operation was not sanitized before being used in a call to popen(), allowing an unauthenticated attacker to inject commands, which would be run as root, with a simple POST request.

CVSS vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/174131/TP-Link-Archer-AX21-Command-Injection.html
• https://www.tenable.com/security/research/tra-2023-11
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/174131/TP-Link-Archer-AX21-Command-Injection.html
• https://www.tenable.com/security/research/tra-2023-11
• https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2023-1389