CVE-2023-29492 — Novi Survey
CRITICALCVE-2023-29492 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) Code Injection vulnerability in novisurvey novi survey. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2023-04-13) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Novi Survey before 8.9.43676 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the server in the context of the service account. This does not provide access to stored survey or response data.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2023-04-13. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2023-05-04.
- 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-2023-29492.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-29492 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Novi Survey before 8.9.43676 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the server in the context of the service account. This does not provide access to stored survey or response data.
Affected Products
novi surveynovisurveyResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every novisurvey novi survey deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2023-29492 yet — track the novisurvey novi survey advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds 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. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-29492 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.