Several DoS, Code Execution Vulnerabilities Found in Rockwell Automation Controllers

Organizations using controllers made by Rockwell Automation have been informed recently about several potentially serious vulnerabilities.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last week published three advisories to describe a total of four high-severity vulnerabilities. Rockwell Automation has published individual advisories for each security hole.

One flaw is CVE-2022-3156, which impacts the Studio 5000 Logix Emulate controller emulation software. The vulnerability is caused by a misconfiguration that results in users being granted elevated permissions on certain product services. An attacker could exploit the weakness for remote code execution.

The second vulnerability is CVE-2022-3157, which affects CompactLogix, GuardLogix (including Compact), and ControlLogix controllers. An attacker can exploit the flaw to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against a device by sending specially crafted CIP requests that cause a “major non-recoverable fault”.

The remaining vulnerabilities impact MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 programmable logic controllers (PLCs). One of the security holes, CVE-2022-46670, is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) issue in the embedded webserver that can be exploited for remote code execution without authentication.

“The payload is transferred to the controller over SNMP and is rendered on the homepage of the embedded website,” Rockwell explained in its advisory (registration required).

The second bug, CVE-2022-3166, is a clickjacking issue that can be exploited by an attacker with network access to the affected device to cause a DoS condition for the webserver application.

Researchers from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) and Georgia Institute of Technology have been credited for reporting the MicroLogix PLC vulnerabilities to Rockwell.

The first two vulnerabilities have been patched with updates. For the last two issues, the vendor has made available mitigations that should prevent attacks.

Rockwell says it’s not aware of any malicious attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities.

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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