Recently, there has been a discovery of a critical security vulnerability found in Ivanti Connect Secure, Ivanti Policy Secure, and Ivanti Neurons for ZTA gateways. This vulnerability, dubbed CVE-2025-0283, is a stack-based buffer overflow that allows local authenticated attackers to escalate their privileges. It affects these Ivanti products before the following versions:

Ivanti Neurons for ZTA gateways before version 22.7R2.3

In this post, we'll dive deeper into the details of the exploit, look at a code snippet to better understand the vulnerability, and link to the original references for further information.

Explaining CVE-2025-0283

This stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability occurs when an attacker is able to flood a program's memory with more data than its buffer can store. As a result, the adjacent memory locations containing critical data such as return addresses get overwritten. By carefully crafting the overflowing data, a local attacker can modify the flow of a running program, allowing them to escalate their privileges.

Exploit Details

The vulnerability exists in the handling of certain functions related to user input. By carefully crafting a long and malicious input, an attacker can trigger the buffer overflow. A local attacker with valid credentials can exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted request containing a long malicious input to the vulnerable Ivanti product.

Here's a code snippet to illustrate the issue

void vulnerable_function(char *input) {
    char buffer[256];

    strcpy(buffer, input); // vulnerable line - overflow occurs here

    // ... rest of the function
}

In the code snippet above, the strcpy() function is called without checking the size of the input, and the buffer is only 256 bytes in size. If an attacker provides an input larger than 256 bytes, the buffer will overflow, causing the vulnerability.

Impact

A successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow a local authenticated attacker to escalate their privileges, potentially obtaining administrative or system-level access. This could lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data, system disruptions, or further attacks on an organization's infrastructure.

- Ivanti Security Advisory
- CVE-2025-0283
- MITRE CVE Entry

Mitigating the Vulnerability

Organizations should immediately update their Ivanti Connect Secure, Ivanti Policy Secure, and Ivanti Neurons for ZTA gateways to the latest versions mentioned earlier in this post. This will protect against the exploitation of this buffer overflow vulnerability.

Furthermore, it is essential to regularly apply security patches and keep software up-to-date in order to reduce the risk of these types of vulnerabilities being exploited.

In conclusion, CVE-2025-0283 is a severe vulnerability that affects numerous Ivanti products. By understanding the details of the exploit and updating software accordingly, organizations can take necessary steps to protect their networks and infrastructure from potential attackers.

Timeline

Published on: 01/08/2025 23:15:09 UTC