How severe is CVE-2017-17562?

CVE-2017-17562 has a CVSS 3.1 base score of 8.1 (HIGH). EPSS estimates a 96.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days. It is listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

CVE-2017-17562: Embedthis GoAhead Remote Code Execution

CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities

Embedthis GoAhead Remote Code Execution Vulnerability is confirmed as actively exploited and is listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

Added to KEV

2021-12-10

Remediation due

2022-06-10

Required action
Apply updates per vendor instructions.

CISA notes
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-17562

Description

Embedthis GoAhead before 3.6.5 allows remote code execution if CGI is enabled and a CGI program is dynamically linked. This is a result of initializing the environment of forked CGI scripts using untrusted HTTP request parameters in the cgiHandler function in cgi.c. When combined with the glibc dynamic linker, this behaviour can be abused for remote code execution using special parameter names such as LD_PRELOAD. An attacker can POST their shared object payload in the body of the request, and reference it using /proc/self/fd/0.

Severity

CVSS 3.1 · CISA8.1 HIGH

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

SSVC · CISA-ADP

Exploitationactive

Automatableno

Technical impacttotal

Affected Products

Vendor	Product	Affected versions
-	-	n/a

References

8 Links

Exploits & PoCs

Vulnerability databases

1040702

Other references

Record Details

Published

2017-12-12

Last updated

2025-10-21

Assigner (CNA)

mitre

Credited to

CVE record data © The MITRE Corporation, used under the CVE Terms of Use. Exploited-in-the-wild data from the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (CC0). Exploit prediction scores by FIRST EPSS (first.org/epss). This site is not endorsed or certified by MITRE, NVD, CISA, or FIRST.