Security researchers have uncovered three critical vulnerabilities in Extreme Networks’ IQ Engine (HiveOS) that collectively enable authenticated attackers to escalate privileges, decrypt passwords, and execute arbitrary commands on affected systems.
The flaws—tracked as CVE-2025-27229, CVE-2025-27228, and CVE-2025-27227—were disclosed through coordinated efforts led by Lukas Schauer of Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, prompting Extreme Networks to release patched firmware (version 10.7r5).
Exploit Chains
The most severe vulnerability, CVE-2025-27229, stems from improper sanitization of SSH tunnel configurations in HiveOS versions prior to 10.7r5.
Attackers with authenticated user access could manipulate SSH parameters to inject malicious arguments into the sshd service, bypassing privilege controls to gain root shell access.
This exploit leverages the lack of input validation in the tunnel.c module, where environment variables like PermitRootLogin and AllowTcpForwarding are dynamically configured without sandboxing.
Parallel to this, CVE-2025-27228 exposes a cryptographic weakness in HiveOS’ command-line interface (CLI).
The user-config utility stores passwords using a deterministic encryption algorithm with a static initialization vector (IV), allowing authenticated users to decrypt credentials via CLI commands such as show running-config | decrypt -iv 0x3F7A.
Researchers demonstrated that hashes encrypted with AES-256-CBC could be reversed in under 90 seconds using GPU-accelerated brute-force attacks.
The third flaw, CVE-2025-27227, resides in the Client-SSID configuration handler. By appending newline characters (n) to SSID names—e.g., “Malicious_SSIDn/bin/bash -c ‘rm -rf /’”—attackers can break out of the intended input field and execute shell commands.
This vulnerability arises from the parse_ssid() function’s reliance on unsanitized scanf() calls, enabling buffer overflow and command injection.
Impact on Network Infrastructure
These vulnerabilities create a trifecta of risks for enterprises using unpatched HiveOS deployments. An attacker with low-privilege credentials could:
- Extract administrative passwords via CVE-2025-27228
- Escalate to root using CVE-2025-27229
- Deploy persistent backdoors via CVE-2025-27227
Notably, proof-of-concept exploits require only Python’s paramiko library for SSH manipulation and standard Linux utilities like grep and sed for payload delivery.
Extreme Networks confirmed that all HiveOS versions before 10.7r5 are affected, including IoT edge devices and wireless controllers in the AP4000 series.
Mitigation and Patch Deployment
Extreme Networks has released firmware update 10.7r5 with the following remediations:
- CVE-2025-27229: Implemented whitelist filtering for SSH arguments using regex patterns (^[a-zA-Z0-9_=-]+$)
- CVE-2025-27228: Migrated to Argon2id for password hashing and enforced PBKDF2 with 100,000 iterations
- CVE-2025-27227: Added input sanitization via strnlen() and strlcpy() in SSID parsing functions
Administrators must manually apply the update using:
Legacy systems beyond End-of-Life (EOL) status remain unpatched, necessitating hardware upgrades.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added these CVEs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, mandating federal agencies to patch them by March 15, 2025.
Private organizations are advised to:
- Audit SSH configurations for anomalous port forwards
- Monitor CLI activity logs for decryption attempts
- Segment network zones to limit lateral movement
As of writing, no active exploits have been detected in the wild, but the simplicity of attack vectors suggests imminent weaponization. Network operators should prioritize patching to mitigate operational and reputational risks.
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