CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0234 — Cisco Aironet Access Point Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the implementation of Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) functionality in Cisco Aironet 1810, 1830, and 1850 Series Access Points 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 insufficient validation of Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) frames that pass through the data plane of an affected access point. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by initiating a PPTP connection to an affected access point from a device that is registered to the same wireless network as the access point and sending a malicious GRE frame through the data plane of the access point. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the NSS core process on the affected access point to crash, which would cause the access point to reload and result in a DoS condition. This vulnerability affects Cisco Aironet 1810, 1830, and 1850 Series Access Points that are running Cisco Mobility Express Software Release 8.4.100.0, 8.5.103.0, or 8.5.105.0 and are configured as a master, subordinate, or standalone access point. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvf73890.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2018-05-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 8.4(100.0)
  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 8.5(103.0)
  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 8.5(105.0)

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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