CVE-2020-2030: 
PAN-OS vulnerability analysis and mitigation

An OS Command Injection vulnerability (CVE-2020-2030) was discovered in the PAN-OS management interface that allows authenticated administrators to execute arbitrary OS commands with root privileges. The vulnerability affects PAN-OS 8.1 versions earlier than PAN-OS 8.1.15, and all versions of PAN-OS 7.1 and PAN-OS 8.0. This issue was discovered internally by Jin Chen of Palo Alto Networks and disclosed on July 8, 2020. The vulnerability does not impact PAN-OS 9.0, PAN-OS 9.1, or Prisma Access services (Palo Advisory).

The vulnerability is classified as an OS Command Injection (CWE-78) with a CVSSv3.1 Base Score of 7.2 (HIGH). The attack vector is network-based (AV:N) with low attack complexity (AC:L), requires high privileges (PR:H), no user interaction (UI:N), and has an unchanged scope (S:U). The impact includes high confidentiality (C:H), integrity (I:H), and availability (A:H) (NVD, Palo Advisory).

If exploited, this vulnerability allows authenticated administrators to execute arbitrary OS commands with root privileges on affected systems. This could lead to complete system compromise, including potential access to sensitive information, system modification, and service disruption (Palo Advisory).

The vulnerability requires an authenticated administrator account to exploit, making it more difficult to leverage in attacks. However, once an attacker has administrative access, the attack complexity is considered low (Palo Advisory).

The vulnerability is fixed in PAN-OS 8.1.15 and all later PAN-OS versions. For systems that cannot be immediately updated, Palo Alto Networks recommends following best practices for securing the PAN-OS management interface by reviewing the Best Practices for Securing Administrative Access in the PAN-OS technical documentation (Palo Advisory).