CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0117 — Cisco Asr 5000 Firmware security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the ingress packet processing functionality of the Cisco Virtualized Packet Core-Distributed Instance (VPC-DI) Software 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 malicious traffic to the internal distributed instance (DI) network address 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 affects Cisco Virtualized Packet Core-Distributed Instance (VPC-DI) Software N4.0 through N5.5 with the Cisco StarOS operating system 19.2 through 21.3. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCve17656.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2018-02-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / asr_5000_firmware / 21.1.v0.66836
  • cisco / asr_5000_firmware / 21.1.v7
  • cisco / asr_5000_firmware / 21.3.0
  • cisco / asr_5000_firmware / 21.6.0
  • cisco / asr_5500_firmware / 21.1.v0.66836
  • cisco / asr_5500_firmware / 21.1.v7

Showing 6 representative product identities from 8 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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