CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2017-6159 — F5 Big-Ip Local Traffic Manager security vulnerability
F5 BIG-IP LTM, AAM, AFM, Analytics, APM, ASM, DNS, GTM, Link Controller, PEM, Websafe software version 12.0.0 to 12.1.2, 11.6.0 to 11.6.1 are vulnerable to a denial of service attack when the MPTCP option is enabled on a virtual server. Data plane is vulnerable when using the MPTCP option of a TCP profile. There is no control plane exposure. An attacker may be able to disrupt services by causing TMM to restart hence temporarily failing to process traffic.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.9 (3.0)
- Published
- 2017-10-27
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
Affected products
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 11.6.0
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 11.6.1
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 12.0.0
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 12.1.0
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 12.1.1
- f5 / big-ip_local_traffic_manager / 12.1.2
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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