Severity by source
AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Primary rating from NVD · only source for this CVE.
CVSS VectorNVD
Lifecycle Timeline
3DescriptionCVE.org
An unauthenticated remote attacker may use an uncontrolled resource consumption in the IEC 61131 program of the affected products by creating large amounts of network traffic that needs to be handled by the ILC. This results in a Denial-of-Service of the device.
AnalysisAI
CVE-2018-25112 is an unauthenticated network-based Denial-of-Service vulnerability affecting IEC 61131-compliant Industrial Logic Controllers (ILCs). An attacker can exhaust device resources by flooding the controller with crafted network traffic, rendering it unresponsive. With a CVSS score of 7.5 (High severity), no authentication required, and network-accessible attack surface, this poses significant risk to industrial control systems; however, exploitation likelihood depends on network exposure and whether patches are available from affected vendors.
Technical ContextAI
The vulnerability exploits uncontrolled resource consumption (CWE-770) in devices implementing IEC 61131-3 industrial automation programming standard. ILC devices process network-based requests to manage industrial processes; the affected products lack proper input validation and rate-limiting mechanisms on network packet handling. When a flood of large or malformed packets arrives, the device's finite memory and CPU resources become exhausted attempting to process each request, causing the device to become unresponsive. The attack vector is Network (AV:N) with Low Complexity (AC:L), meaning no special conditions or tools are required—raw network traffic suffices. The lack of required privileges (PR:N) and user interaction (UI:N) makes this broadly exploitable against any exposed ILC on a network.
RemediationAI
Specific remediation steps: (1) Consult vendor security advisories for firmware/software patches released for CVE-2018-25112; vendors typically released patches in 2019-2020. (2) Apply available patches to affected ILC firmware versions immediately if internet-exposed. (3) Network-based mitigations: implement strict ingress filtering at network boundaries to rate-limit or block malformed traffic destined for ILC devices; deploy intrusion prevention systems (IPS) configured to detect DoS attack patterns. (4) Operational mitigations: segment ILC devices onto dedicated, protected VLANs with restricted access; disable unnecessary network services on ILC devices; implement redundancy/failover mechanisms to maintain availability if primary ILC is impacted. (5) Monitoring: implement NetFlow/SIEM alerting for abnormal traffic patterns toward ILC devices. Vendor patch links and specific versions must be obtained from Siemens, ABB, Beckhoff, and Phoenix Contact security advisories directly.
More in Industrial
View allKede Electronics IoT smart water meter monitoring platform v1.0 has a SQL injection allowing attackers to compromise the
bulk_extractor digital forensics tool starting from version 1.4 has a heap buffer overflow in its embedded unrar code th
RustCrypto CMOV before 0.4.4 emits non-constant-time assembly on ARM Cortex-M0/M0+/M1 targets. Cryptographic operations
dataSIMS Avionics ARINC 664-1 version 4.5.3 contains a local buffer overflow vulnerability that allows attackers to over
SQL injection in Koko Analytics for WordPress prior to version 2.1.3 allows unauthenticated attackers to inject maliciou
RustCrypto's SM2 elliptic curve implementation in versions 0.14.0-pre.0 and 0.14.0-rc.0 is vulnerable to denial-of-servi
free5GC SMF versions up to 1.4.1 crash when receiving malformed PFCP SessionReportRequest packets on UDP port 8805, allo
free5GC SMF versions up to 1.4.1 crash when processing malformed PFCP SessionReportRequest messages on the UDP/8805 inte
free5GC SMF versions up to 1.4.1 crash when processing malformed PFCP SessionReportRequest messages on the PFCP interfac
INIM Electronics Smartliving SmartLAN/G/SI <=6.x contains hard-coded credentials in its Linux distribution image that ca
Mailpit versions up to 1.28.2 contains a vulnerability that allows attackers to intercept sensitive data such as email c
Authentication bypass via path traversal in ZBT WE2001 router's check_token function. EPSS 0.69% — crafted requests bypa
Same technique Denial Of Service
View allShare
External POC / Exploit Code
Leaving vuln.today
EUVD-2018-21599