CVE-2023-1389
HIGHCVE-2023-1389 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) CWE-77 vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2023-05-01) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) firmware versions before 1.1.4 Build 20230219 contained a command injection vulnerability in the country form of the /cgi-bin/luci;stok=/locale endpoint…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2023-05-01. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2023-05-22.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2023-1389.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-1389 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 384,189 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) firmware versions before 1.1.4 Build 20230219 contained a command injection vulnerability in the country form of the /cgi-bin/luci;stok=/locale endpoint on the web management interface. Specifically, the country parameter of the write operation was not sanitized before being used in a call to popen(), allowing an unauthenticated attacker to inject commands, which would be run as root, with a simple POST request.
Affected Products
archer ax21 firmwaretp-linkResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
TP-Link Archer AX21 - Unauthenticated Command Injection
by Voyag3r · Aug 10, 2023
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2023-1389 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Stop passing untrusted input into the interpreter or shell: call the affected binary with an argument array rather than a composed command string, reject anything outside a strict allowlist of expected values, and run the component under an account that cannot reach beyond the work it legitimately does.
How to detect CVE-2023-1389
A community-maintained Nuclei template exists for this CVE. You can scan for it directly:
nuclei -id cve-2023-1389 -u https://target- Template
- TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) - Unauthenticated Command Injection
- Severity
- critical
- Impact
- Unauthenticated attackers can exploit OS command injection through the country parameter in the locale endpoint to execute arbitrary commands as root and completely compromise TP-Link Archer AX21 routers.
- Remediation
- Update to the latest firmware version provided by TP-Link.
Template by ProjectDiscovery nuclei-templates (ritikchaddha), MIT licensed. View the full template. Scan only systems you are authorised to test.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-1389 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.