Critical Flaw in GoAhead Web Server Could Affect Wide Range of IoT Devices

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered details of two new vulnerabilities in the GoAhead web server software, a tiny application widely embedded in hundreds of millions of Internet-connected smart devices.

One of the two vulnerabilities, assigned as CVE-2019-5096, is a critical code execution flaw that can be exploited by attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable devices and take control over them.

The first vulnerability resides in the way multi-part/form-data requests are processed within the base GoAhead web server application, affecting GoAhead Web Server versions v5.0.1, v.4.1.1, and v3.6.5.

According to the researchers at Cisco Talos, while processing a specially crafted HTTP request, an attacker exploiting the vulnerability can cause use-after-free condition on the server and corrupt heap structures, leading to code execution attacks.

The second vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5097, also resides in the same component of the GoAhead Web Server and can be exploited in the same way, but this one leads to denial-of-service attacks.

“A specially crafted HTTP request can lead to an infinite loop in the process (resulting in 100 percent CPU utilization). The…