CVE-2017-20161
Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.
NVD · uneditedA vulnerability classified as problematic has been found in rofl0r MacGeiger. Affected is the function dump_wlan_at of the file macgeiger.c of the component ESSID Handler. The manipulation leads to injection. Access to the local network is required for this attack to succeed. The complexity of an attack is rather high. The exploitability is told to be difficult. The name of the patch is 57f1dd50a4821b8c8e676e8020006ae4bfd3c9cb. It is recommended to apply a patch to fix this issue. The identifier of this vulnerability is VDB-217188.
Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.
dbcve analysisUntrusted input crosses into a downstream interpreter — SQL, a shell, an HTML page, an LDAP query — without being kept separate from the commands around it, so the attacker's data is read as instructions. This is the parent class behind SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and command injection alike. The durable fix is the same everywhere: keep data and code apart at every boundary, using parameterisation or context-aware encoding rather than building interpreted strings by concatenation.
General guidance for the injection class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →
Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.
NVD · CPE data< 2017-12-02CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.
From the vector- Attack vector
- Local
- Complexity
- Low
- Privileges
- Low
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- High
- Integrity
- High
- Availability
- High
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.
dbcve · scoped2017-12-02
Any release version dated 2017-12-02 or later that includes commit 57f1dd5
- Clone or pull the latest MacGeiger repository from https://github.com/rofl0r/MacGeiger
- Review the patch at commit 57f1dd50a4821b8c8e676e8020006ae4bfd3c9cb to understand the code changes
- Apply the patch or manually apply the fix to macgeiger.c in the dump_wlan_at function to address the injection vulnerability in the ESSID handler
- Rebuild the application after applying the fix
- Verify the fix resolves the issue by testing with malformed ESSID inputs
Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.
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Free · runs locallyCheck whether your project pulls in CVE-2017-20161 — or any other known-vulnerable package — straight from your lock files. Free and open source; it runs locally and uploads nothing.
References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.
Primary sourcesPractitioner notes
ContributedPeer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2017-20161 in production — separate from our analysis above.
The advisory tells you what broke. It rarely tells you what actually worked. If you’ve dealt with this one, that detail is what the next engineer is searching for.
- The version that genuinely resolved it — not the one the vendor claimed
- A config change or rule that shut the vector down
- A gotcha in the upgrade path that cost you an afternoon
No notes yet
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- Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
- No weaponised exploit code, or anything meant to cause harm
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