Description

Dell SCG 5.0 Appliance versions prior to 5.36.00.16 and Dell SCG 5.0 Application versions prior to 5.36.00.00, contains an Use of Hard-coded Credentials vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker with remote access could potentially exploit this vulnerability, leading to information exposure.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-09T14:17:18.047Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-09T14:17:18.047Z",
  "executiveSummary": "Dell Secure Connect Gateway (SCG) 5.0 Appliance and Application versions contain a vulnerability categorized as Use of Hard-coded Credentials. This flaw allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information by leveraging credentials embedded within the software. The vulnerability poses a significant security risk as it bypasses standard authentication mechanisms, potentially leading to full information exposure of the affected environment. Systems running Dell SCG Appliance versions prior to 5.36.00.16 and Application versions prior to 5.36.00.00 are susceptible to this exploitation. Successful exploitation does not require prior knowledge of legitimate user accounts, enabling low-complexity remote attacks that could result in the compromise of system data and management infrastructure.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability is the presence of static, hard-coded credentials embedded within the source code or configuration files of the Dell SCG 5.0 ecosystem. In secure software development, credentials must be dynamically generated, rotated, or managed via secure key vaults. By hard-coding these secrets, the manufacturer has introduced a static backdoor that remains consistent across all deployments of the affected versions.\nThe attack flow initiates when an unauthenticated remote attacker identifies the exposed management interface or service associated with the Dell SCG appliance. Because the credentials are hard-coded and static, the attacker does not need to perform brute-force attacks, credential stuffing, or exploit secondary vulnerabilities to gain initial entry. Once the attacker identifies the specific service utilizing these embedded credentials, they can programmatically authenticate to the application using the predefined username and password pair.\nUpon successful authentication, the attacker bypasses the intended security boundary, granting them the privileges associated with the hard-coded account. Given the architectural role of the Secure Connect Gateway, this account often possesses high-level access to system configurations, device telemetry, and potentially connected infrastructure components. The payload behavior involves the attacker querying the application to retrieve sensitive data, which could include internal configuration details, connectivity logs, or managed device metadata.\nThis vulnerability is particularly critical due to the lack of required user interaction or prior authentication. Since the service is exposed remotely, the network vector allows an attacker to scan for and interact with the vulnerable appliance from any location with IP connectivity. The post-exploitation impact includes unauthorized information disclosure, the potential for further reconnaissance of the internal network segment hosting the SCG appliance, and the possibility of data exfiltration of managed system logs or authentication tokens stored by the gateway.\nThe affected components comprise the core application logic and the appliance software stack in versions preceding 5.36.00.16 (Appliance) and 5.36.00.00 (Application). Because these credentials were likely intended for internal service-to-service communication or debugging purposes, their availability to unauthenticated external entities represents a complete failure of the authentication control layer, necessitating immediate vendor-supplied updates to rotate secrets and remove static authentication pathways."
}