What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-15803

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2019-11-14 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-287

Description

An issue was discovered on Zyxel GS1900 devices with firmware before 2.50(AAHH.0)C0. Through an undocumented sequence of keypresses, undocumented functionality is triggered. A diagnostics shell is triggered via CTRL-ALT-t, which prompts for the password returned by fds_sys_passDebugPasswd_ret(). The firmware contains access control checks that determine if remote users are allowed to access this functionality. The function that performs this check (fds_sys_remoteDebugEnable_ret in libfds.so) always return TRUE with no actual checks performed. The diagnostics menu allows for reading/writing arbitrary registers and various other configuration parameters which are believed to be related to the network interface chips.

Affected products

• Zyxel GS1900-10HP firmware: before 2.50\(aazi.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aazi.0\)c0
• Zyxel GS1900-16 firmware: before 2.50\(aahj.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahj.0\)c0
• Zyxel GS1900-24 firmware: before 2.50\(aahl.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahl.0\)c0
• Zyxel GS1900-24E firmware: before 2.50\(aahk.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahk.0\)c0
• Zyxel Gs1900-24Hp Firmware: before 2.50\(aahm.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahm.0\)c0
• Zyxel GS1900-48 firmware: before 2.50\(aahn.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahn.0\)c0
• Zyxel Gs1900-48Hp Firmware: before 2.50\(aaho.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aaho.0\)c0
• Zyxel GS1900-8 firmware: before 2.50\(aahh.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahh.0\)c0
• Zyxel GS1900-8HP firmware: before 2.50\(aahi.0\)c0 — fixed in 2.50\(aahi.0\)c0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Zyxel GS1900-10HP firmware 2.50\(aazi.0\)c0; Zyxel GS1900-16 firmware 2.50\(aahj.0\)c0; Zyxel GS1900-24 firmware 2.50\(aahl.0\)c0; Zyxel GS1900-24E firmware 2.50\(aahk.0\)c0; Zyxel Gs1900-24Hp Firmware 2.50\(aahm.0\)c0; Zyxel GS1900-48 firmware 2.50\(aahn.0\)c0; Zyxel Gs1900-48Hp Firmware 2.50\(aaho.0\)c0; Zyxel GS1900-8 firmware 2.50\(aahh.0\)c0; Zyxel GS1900-8HP firmware 2.50\(aahi.0\)c0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://jasper.la/exploring-zyxel-gs1900-firmware-with-ghidra.html
• https://www.zyxel.com/support/gs1900-switch-vulnerabilities.shtml
• https://jasper.la/exploring-zyxel-gs1900-firmware-with-ghidra.html
• https://www.zyxel.com/support/gs1900-switch-vulnerabilities.shtml

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