Executive brief
NASA's AMMOS Instrument Toolkit (AIT) GUI, a tool used for spacecraft mission operations, contains a critical security flaw that allows unauthorized users to bypass login requirements. By exploiting this vulnerability, a remote attacker could gain full control over the system's session management and issue unauthorized commands to spacecraft. This could lead to a total loss of control over mission assets, unauthorized data access, and significant operational disruption.
Technical details
A missing authentication vulnerability (CWE-306) exists in the AIT-GUI component of the AMMOS Instrument Toolkit. The root cause is a lack of credential verification in the Sessions.create() function, which allows any network-reachable attacker to generate a valid session without providing credentials. Once a session is established, the attacker can invoke the handle_cmd() function to dispatch arbitrary commands directly to the AIT command bus. This bypasses all intended security gates between session creation and command execution. The vulnerability is resolved in version 2.5.1.
Affected products
- NASA-AMMOS AIT-GUI before 2.5.1
Timeline
- 2026-07-29: advisory: Vulnerability disclosed by VulnCheck and published in NVD
- 2026-07-10: patched: Version 2.5.1 released to address the issue