CVE-2025-0283 - Ivanti Connect Secure Stack-Based Buffer Overflow Leads to Local Privilege Escalation

This vulnerability is a stack-based buffer overflow, which means an attacker can write more data than expected into a program's memory—potentially overwriting critical code, gaining control, and escalating privileges.

Who is Impacted?

Any organization running vulnerable versions of these Ivanti products is at risk, especially if an attacker can access the system as a local authenticated user. While remote unauthenticated attackers are not directly in scope, corporate networks often have insiders or compromised accounts, making exploitation realistic.

How Does the Vulnerability Work?

Ivanti's affected products contain C/C++ code that fails to properly check the length of data ("user input") before copying it into a fixed-size stack buffer. If an authenticated user provides especially crafted input, the vulnerable code can overflow the buffer, overwriting the application’s stack memory.

This can result in

- Crashes/Denial-of-Service: Overwriting stack memory can cause the process to crash.
- Privilege Escalation: By controlling what gets written to the stack (like the return address), an attacker could make the program execute malicious code with higher privileges.

Imagine a C function like this (note: just a generic example)

void vuln_function(char *user_input) {
    char buf[64];
    strcpy(buf, user_input); // unsafe: no bounds checking!
    // ... more code
}

If user_input is longer than 64 characters, it will overwrite adjacent stack memory—creating the vulnerability.

Login: Attacker logs into the system as a normal user.

2. Trigger Overflow: Attacker supplies a carefully crafted long string to the vulnerable process (such as via a configuration import or custom command).
3. Control Flow Hijack: The attacker's input overwrites the return address on the stack, pointing it to shellcode or a privilege escalation payload.
4. Result: The process now runs the attacker’s code with elevated privileges—gaining admin/root rights.

Exploit Example

While releasing full weaponized code would be irresponsible, here’s a simplified proof-of-concept (PoC) in Python, simulating an exploit that could trigger the vulnerability:

import socket

HOST = "localhost"  # Replace with actual host
PORT = 12345        # Vulnerable service port

# Construct a malicious string—80 'A's to overflow a 64-byte buffer
payload = b"A" * 80

with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) as s:
    s.connect((HOST, PORT))
    s.sendall(payload)
    print("Payload sent. Check system for unexpected behavior or privilege escalation.")

Warning: Do not use this against any system you do not own. This code is for educational, lab-demonstration purposes only.

References

- Ivanti Security Advisory for CVE-2025-0283 (Official) *(Check for accurate link - official advisories are regularly updated)*
- NIST NVD: CVE-2025-0283
- Ivanti Product Security Updates

Stay safe, and patch promptly. Buffer overflows are a classic bug, but they're still highly effective for attackers, especially when they lead straight to privilege escalation. If you use these Ivanti products, update as soon as possible.


*This post is original content for exclusive use. Distributed or derivative works should attribute accordingly.*

Timeline

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