CVE-2023-50224 — Tl-Wr841n Firmware
MEDIUMCVE-2023-50224 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) CWE-290 vulnerability in tp-link tl-wr841n firmware. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-09-03) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
TP-Link TL-WR841N dropbearpwd Improper Authentication Information Disclosure Vulnerability. This vulnerability allows network-adjacent attackers to disclose sensitive information on…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-09-03. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-09-24.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2023-50224.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-50224 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
TP-Link TL-WR841N dropbearpwd Improper Authentication Information Disclosure Vulnerability. This vulnerability allows network-adjacent attackers to disclose sensitive information on affected installations of TP-Link TL-WR841N routers. Authentication is not required to exploit this vulnerability. The specific flaw exists within the httpd service, which listens on TCP port 80 by default. The issue results from improper authentication. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to disclose stored credentials, leading to further compromise. Was ZDI-CAN-19899.
Affected Products
tl-wr841n firmwaretp-linkDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every tp-link tl-wr841n firmware deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2023-50224 yet — track the tp-link tl-wr841n firmware advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Assume what was exposed is already known: rotate any credential, token or key that the affected component could return, restrict the endpoint to callers that genuinely need it, and strip sensitive fields from responses and error output at the boundary rather than relying on the client not to read them. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-50224 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.