A vulnerability in the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) restore functionality that is available in Cisco ASA Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system with root-level privileges. Administrator-level privileges are required to exploit this vulnerability. This vulnerability exists because the contents of a backup file are improperly sanitized at restore time. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by restoring a crafted backup file to an affected device.

A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying Linux operating system as root.