The Emerson DeltaV Distributed Control System (DCS) through 2022-04-29 mishandles authentication. It utilizes several proprietary protocols for a wide variety of functionality. These protocols include Firmware upgrade (18508/TCP, 18518/TCP); Plug-and-Play (18510/UDP); Hawk services (18507/UDP); Management (18519/TCP); Cold restart (18512/UDP); SIS communications (12345/TCP); and Wireless Gateway Protocol (18515/UDP). None of these protocols have any authentication features, allowing any attacker capable of communicating with the ports in question to invoke (a subset of) desired functionality.

The Emerson DeltaV Distributed Control System (DCS) controllers and IO cards through 2022-04-29 misuse passwords. Access to privileged operations on the maintenance port TELNET interface (23/TCP) on M-series and SIS (CSLS/LSNB/LSNG) nodes is controlled by means of utility passwords. These passwords are generated using a deterministic, insecure algorithm using a single seed value composed of a day/hour/minute timestamp with less than 16 bits of entropy. The seed value is fed through a lookup table and a series of permutation operations resulting in three different four-character passwords corresponding to different privilege levels. An attacker can easily reconstruct these passwords and thus gain access to privileged maintenance operations. NOTE: this is different from CVE-2014-2350.

A specially crafted script could cause the DeltaV Distributed Control System Controllers (All Versions) to restart and cause a denial-of-service condition.