CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0159 — Cisco IOS and XE Software Internet Key Exchange Version 1 Denial-of-Service Vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8 CISA KEV

A vulnerability in the implementation of Internet Key Exchange Version 1 (IKEv1) functionality in Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of specific IKEv1 packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted IKEv1 packets to an affected device during an IKE negotiation. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an affected device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCuj73916.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2018-03-28
CISA KEV
Known exploited
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / ios / 15.3(3)s
  • cisco / ios_xe / 15.3(3)s

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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