CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-6678 — Cisco Virtualized Packet Core security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

A vulnerability in the ingress UDP packet processing functionality of Cisco Virtualized Packet Core-Distributed Instance (VPC-DI) Software 19.2 through 21.0 could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause both control function (CF) instances on an affected system to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to insufficient handling of user-supplied data by the affected software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted UDP packets to the distributed instance (DI) network addresses of both CF instances on an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an unhandled error condition on the affected system, which would cause the CF instances to reload and consequently cause the entire VPC to reload, resulting in the disconnection of all subscribers and a DoS condition on the affected system. This vulnerability can be exploited via IPv4 traffic only. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvc01665 CSCvc35565.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2017-06-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-755

Affected products

  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / v19.2_base
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / v19.3_base
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / v20.0_base
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / v20.1_base
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / v20.2_base
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core / v21.0_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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