Appliance impersonation via duplicate SSH host keys
Published Jan 12, 2023 · Updated Apr 8, 2025
Hard-coded SSH host keys in Rapid7 Nexpose and InsightVM virtual appliances downloaded April 5–May 3, 2017 allow attackers to impersonate appliances. The distributed images reuse pre-generated keys under /etc/ssh instead of creating unique host keys at first boot. Exploitation requires privileged access to extract a private key plus a network position to redirect or capture SSH traffic, enabling appliance impersonation or traffic decryption.
Summary
What happened
Hard-coded SSH host keys in Rapid7 Nexpose and InsightVM virtual appliances downloaded April 5–May 3, 2017 allow attackers to impersonate appliances. The distributed images reuse pre-generated keys under /etc/ssh instead of creating unique host keys at first boot. Exploitation requires privileged access to extract a private key plus a network position to redirect or capture SSH traffic, enabling appliance impersonation or traffic decryption.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2017-5242
- Published
- Jan 12, 2023
- Updated
- Apr 8, 2025
- Vendor
- Rapid7
- Product
- InsightVM Virtual Appliance
- Classifications
- CWE-330, CWE-321, T1557
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- admin
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jan 12, 2023CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Apr 8, 2025Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=2017.04.05 <2017.04.05*
- Affected versionversion=2017.05.03 <=2017.05.03
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
No public exploit references are available in this record.
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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