CISA Warns of CentreStack’s Hard-Coded MachineKey Vulnerability Enabling RCE Attacks

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a critical security flaw impacting Gladinet CentreStack to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-30406 (CVSS score: 9.0), concerns a case of a hard-coded cryptographic key that could be abused to achieve remote code execution. It has been addressed in version 16.4.10315.56368 released on April 3, 2025.

“Gladinet CentreStack contains a use of hard-coded cryptographic key vulnerability in the way that the application manages keys used for ViewState integrity verification,” CISA said. “Successful exploitation allows an attacker to forge ViewState payloads for server-side deserialization, allowing for remote code execution.”

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Specifically, the shortcoming is rooted in the use of a hard-code “machineKey” in the IIS web.config file, which enables threat actors with knowledge of “machineKey” to serialize a payload for subsequent server-side deserialization in order to achieve remote code execution.

There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being exploited, the identity of the threat actors exploiting it, and who may be the targets of these attacks. That said, a description of the security defect on CVE.org states that CVE-2025-30406 was exploited in the wild in March 2025, indicating its use as a zero-day.

Gladinet, in an advisory, has also acknowledged that “exploitation has been observed in the wild,” urging customers to apply the fixes as soon as possible. If immediate patching is not an option, it’s advised to rotate the machineKey value as a temporary mitigation.

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