Undocumented Diagnostics Shell with Remote Access Control Bypass on Zyxel GS1900 Devices

CVE-2019-15803 · CRITICAL Severity

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

An issue was discovered on Zyxel GS1900 devices with firmware before 2.50(AAHH.0)C0. Through an undocumented sequence of keypresses, undocumented functionality is triggered. A diagnostics shell is triggered via CTRL-ALT-t, which prompts for the password returned by fds_sys_passDebugPasswd_ret(). The firmware contains access control checks that determine if remote users are allowed to access this functionality. The function that performs this check (fds_sys_remoteDebugEnable_ret in libfds.so) always return TRUE with no actual checks performed. The diagnostics menu allows for reading/writing arbitrary registers and various other configuration parameters which are believed to be related to the network interface chips.

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