A null byte interaction error has been discovered in the code that the telnetd_startup daemon uses to construct a pair of ephemeral passwords that allow a user to spawn a telnet service on the router, and to ensure that the telnet service persists upon reboot. By means of a crafted exchange of UDP packets, an unauthenticated attacker on the local network can leverage this null byte interaction error in such a way as to make those ephemeral passwords predictable (with 1-in-94 odds). Since the attacker must manipulate data processed by the OpenSSL function RSA_public_decrypt(), successful exploitation of this vulnerability depends on the use of an unpadded RSA cipher (CVE-2022-25218).

The use of the RSA algorithm without OAEP, or any other padding scheme, in telnetd_startup, allows an unauthenticated attacker on the local area network to achieve a significant degree of control over the "plaintext" to which an arbitrary blob of ciphertext will be decrypted by OpenSSL's RSA_public_decrypt() function. This weakness allows the attacker to manipulate the various iterations of the telnetd startup state machine and eventually obtain a root shell on the device, by means of an exchange of crafted UDP packets. In all versions but K2 22.5.9.163 and K3C 32.1.15.93 a successful attack also requires the exploitation of a null-byte interaction error (CVE-2022-25219).