CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2016-6876 — F5 Big-Ip Local Traffic Manager security vulnerability
The RESOLV::lookup iRule command in F5 BIG-IP LTM, APM, ASM, and Link Controller 10.2.1 through 10.2.4, 11.2.1, 11.4.x, 11.5.x before 11.5.4 HF2, 11.6.x before 11.6.1, and 12.0.0 before HF3; BIG-IP AAM, AFM, and PEM 11.4.x, 11.5.x before 11.5.4 HF2, 11.6.x before 11.6.1, and 12.0.0 before HF3; BIG-IP Analytics 11.2.1, 11.4.x, 11.5.x before 11.5.4 HF2, 11.6.x before 11.6.1, and 12.0.0 before HF3; BIG-IP DNS 12.0.0 before HF3; BIG-IP Edge Gateway, WebAccelerator, and WOM 10.2.1 through 10.2.4 and 11.2.1; BIG-IP GTM 10.2.1 through 10.2.4, 11.2.1, 11.4.x, 11.5.x before 11.5.4 HF2, and 11.6.x before 11.6.1; and BIG-IP PSM 10.2.1 through 10.2.4 and 11.4.0 through 11.4.1 allows remote DNS servers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or Traffic Management Microkernel crash) via a crafted PTR response.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.0)
- Published
- 2016-09-07
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-399
Affected products
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 10.2.1
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 10.2.2
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 10.2.3
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 10.2.4
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 11.2.1
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 11.4.0
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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