CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-3864 — Cisco Ios security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the DHCP client implementation of Cisco IOS (12.2, 12.4, and 15.0 through 15.6) and Cisco IOS XE (3.3 through 3.7) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability occurs during the parsing of a crafted DHCP packet. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted DHCP packets to an affected device that is configured as a DHCP client. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a reload of an affected device, resulting in a DoS condition. This vulnerability affects Cisco devices that are running a vulnerable release of Cisco IOS or IOS XE Software and using a specific DHCP client configuration. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCuu43892.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2017-03-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-399

Affected products

  • cisco / ios
  • cisco / ios / 12.2
  • cisco / ios / 12.4
  • cisco / ios_xe

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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