Findings

CVE-2022-46169

Cacti Command Injection Vulnerability

Published Dec 5, 2022 · updated Jun 16, 2026 · cacti cacti

Cacti is an open source platform which provides a robust and extensible operational monitoring and fault management framework for users. In affected versions a command injection vulnerability allows an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on a server running Cacti, if a specific data source was selected for any monitored device. The vulnerability resides in the file. This file can be accessed without authentication. This function retrieves the IP address of the client via and resolves this IP address to the corresponding hostname via . After this, it is verified that an entry within the table exists, where the hostname corresponds to the resolved hostname. If such an entry was found, the function returns and the client is authorized. This authorization can be bypassed due to the implementation of the function. The function is defined in the file and checks serval variables to determine the IP address of the client. The variables beginning with can be arbitrarily set by an attacker. Since there is a default entry in the table with the hostname of the server running Cacti, an attacker can bypass the authentication e.g. by providing the header . This way the function returns the IP address of the server running Cacti. The following call to will resolve this IP address to the hostname of the server, which will pass the hostname check because of the default entry. After the authorization of the file is bypassed, an attacker can trigger different actions. One of these actions is called . The called function retrieves a few request parameters and loads the corresponding entries from the database. If the of a equals , the function is used to execute a PHP script. The attacker-controlled parameter is retrieved via the function , which allows arbitrary strings. This variable is later inserted into the string passed to , which leads to a command injection vulnerability. By e.g. providing the the command is executed. In order to reach the vulnerable call, the attacker