CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0369 — Cisco Staros security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the reassembly logic for fragmented IPv4 packets of Cisco StarOS running on virtual platforms could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a reload of the npusim process, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. There are four instances of the npusim process running per Service Function (SF) instance, each handling a subset of all traffic flowing across the device. It is possible to trigger a reload of all four instances of the npusim process around the same time. The vulnerability is due to improper handling of fragmented IPv4 packets containing options. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious IPv4 packet across an affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a restart of the npusim process, which will result in all traffic queued toward this instance of the npusim process to be dropped while the process is restarting. The npusim process typically restarts within less than a second. This vulnerability affects: Cisco Virtualized Packet Core-Single Instance (VPC-SI), Cisco Virtualized Packet Core-Distributed Instance (VPC-DI), Cisco Ultra Packet Core (UPC). Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvh29613.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2018-07-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / staros

Showing 1 representative product identities from 3 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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