CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0235 — Cisco Wireless Lan Controller Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the 802.11 frame validation functionality of the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause an affected device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incomplete input validation of certain 802.11 management information element frames that an affected device receives from wireless clients. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malformed 802.11 management frame to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition. This vulnerability affects only Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers that are running Cisco Mobility Express Release 8.5.103.0. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvg07024.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2018-05-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / wireless_lan_controller_software / 8.6(1.106)
  • cisco / wireless_lan_controller_software / 8.6(1.114)

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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