Cisco on Wednesday rolled out patches for 10 security flaws spanning multiple products, one of which is rated Critical in severity and could be weaponized to conduct absolute path traversal attacks.

The issues, tracked as CVE-2022-20812 and CVE-2022-20813, affect Cisco Expressway Series and Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) and "could allow a remote attacker to overwrite arbitrary files or conduct null byte poisoning attacks on an affected device," the company said in an advisory.

CVE-2022-20812 (CVSS score: 9.0), which concerns a case of arbitrary file overwrite in the cluster database API, requires the authenticated, remote attacker to have Administrator read-write privileges on the application so as to be able to mount path traversal attacks as a root user.

"This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of user-supplied command arguments," the company said. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to the system as an administrative read-write user and submitting crafted input to the affected command."

Successful exploitation of the flaw could enable the adversary to overwrite arbitrary files on the underlying operating system.

CVE-2022-20813 (CVSS score: 7.4), on the other hand, has been described as a null byte poisoning flaw arising due to improper certificate validation, which could be weaponized by an attacker to stage a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Also patched by Cisco is a high-severity flaw in its Smart Software Manager On-Prem (CVE-2022-20808, CVSS score: 7.7) that could be abused by an authenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device.

Fortinet issues fixes for several products

In a related development, Fortinet addressed multiple high-severity vulnerabilities affecting FortiAnalyzer, FortiClient, FortiDeceptor, and FortiNAC -

• CVE-2021-43072 (CVSS score: 7.4) - Stack-based buffer overflow via crafted CLI execute command in FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, FortiOS and FortiProxy
• CVE-2021-41031 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Privilege Escalation via directory traversal attack in FortiClient for Windows
• CVE-2022-30302 (CVSS score: 7.9) - Multiple path traversal vulnerabilities in FortiDeceptor management interface, and
• CVE-2022-26117 (CVSS score: 8.0) - Unprotected MySQL root account in FortiNAC

Should the flaws be successfully exploited, it may allow an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code, retrieve and delete files, and access MySQL databases, or even permit a local unprivileged actor to escalate to SYSTEM permissions.