Cisco patched five SD-WAN vulnerabilities today that affect routers and SD-WAN management, orchestration, and controller software.

The vendor ranked three of the security flaws "high impact" and two "medium impact" and said its incident response team is not aware of any malicious use of any of the five vulnerabilities. There are no workarounds available for the SD-WAN bugs. All five vulnerabilities, however, require authentication before the attacker can exploit the flaws.

One of the high-impact vulnerabilities in Cisco SD-WAN software could allow an authenticated, local attacker to gain root-level privileges on the operating system. This privilege-escalation attack could allow an attacker to steal access credentials and other sensitive information, download and execute malware, and erase data.

The second high-impact bug, a command injection vulnerability, could allow an authenticated, local attacker to inject arbitrary commands with root privileges, and the third could allow an authenticated, local attacker to cause a buffer overflow on an affected device. Once this happens, the attacker can gain control of the system.

The medium-impact vulnerabilities are in the web user interface of the Cisco SD-WAN vManage software. One allows an attacker to conduct a cross-site scripting attack against the software user and the other enables SQL injection attacks on an affected system.

While all of these vulnerabilities require some form of authentication, which makes them more difficult to exploit, they are noteworthy because of the sheer number of companies that use Cisco SD-WAN services.

The vendor recently said 20,000 customers globally use its SD-WAN technology, which includes its Viptela and Meraki product lines. Additionally, some 70% of the Fortune 100 use Cisco’s SD-WAN as of August 2019.

Reports from Gartner and IHS Markit consistently rank Cisco in the No. 1 or No. 2 vendor spot, jockeying with VMware for SD-WAN dominance.