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Back in May of last year I started doing research on any possible security flaws that exist in the Pix/ASA Finesse operating System, versions 7.1 and 7.2. I discovered that a design flaw that was previously unknown in Finesse will allow a level 0 user to escalate their privilege to level 15. I believe the vulnerability may originate in the local authentication service, thus not being possible to exploit when Radius and TACACS is implemented. Implementing AAA in any other way that keeps the passwords locally defined seems to have no affect on the vulnerability. I have been able to repeatedly bypass the privilege-exec login both locally, through the console and remotely, through a telnet connection. After many attempts I have found that the SSH service does not seem to suffer from the vulnerability.
I am now going to go over the simplicity of the exploit and I will be releasing a white paper hopefully sooner than later on the specifics of the underlying cause. Once a user has logged on to the user-exec (level0) of the device they will then be able to proceed with the