CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2016-6466 — Cisco Asr 5000 Series Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the IPsec component of StarOS for Cisco ASR 5000 Series routers could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to terminate all active IPsec VPN tunnels and prevent new tunnels from establishing, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability affects the following Cisco products: Cisco ASR 5000/5500 Series routers, Cisco Virtualized Packet Core (VPC). More Information: CSCva13631. Known Affected Releases: 20.0.0 20.1.0 20.2.0 20.2.3 20.2.v1 21.0.0 21.0.M0.64246. Known Fixed Releases: 20.2.3 20.2.3.65026 20.2.a4.65307 20.2.v1 20.2.v1.65353 20.3.M0.65037 20.3.T0.65043 21.0.0 21.0.0.65256 21.0.M0.64595 21.0.M0.64860 21.0.M0.65140 21.0.V0.65052 21.0.V0.65150 21.0.V0.65366 21.0.VC0.64639 21.1.A0.64861 21.1.A0.65145 21.1.PP0.65270 21.1.R0.65130 21.1.R0.65135 21.1.R0.65154 21.1.VC0.64898 21.1.VC0.65203 21.2.A0.65147.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.0)
Published
2016-11-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399

Affected products

  • cisco / asr_5000_series_software / 20.0.0
  • cisco / asr_5000_series_software / 20.0.2.3
  • cisco / asr_5000_series_software / 20.0.2.v1
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / 20.0_base

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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