CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0165 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) packet-processing functionality of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to exhaust buffers on an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition, aka a Memory Leak. The vulnerability is due to the affected software insufficiently processing IGMP Membership Query packets that are sent to an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of IGMP Membership Query packets, which contain certain values, to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust buffers on the affected device, resulting in a DoS condition that requires the device to be reloaded manually. This vulnerability affects: Cisco Catalyst 4500 Switches with Supervisor Engine 8-E, if they are running Cisco IOS XE Software Release 3.x.x.E and IP multicast routing is configured; Cisco devices that are running Cisco IOS XE Software Release 16.x, if IP multicast routing is configured. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCuw09295, CSCve94496.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.0)
Published
2018-03-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-772

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 15.2(3)e
  • cisco / ios_xe / denali-16.3.3

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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