CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0372 — Cisco Nx-Os security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

A vulnerability in the DHCPv6 feature of the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to run low on system memory, which could result in a Denial of Service (DoS) condition on an affected system. The vulnerability is due to improper memory management when DHCPv6 packets are received on an interface of the targeted device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high number of malicious DHCPv6 packets to be processed by an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the system to run low on memory, which could cause an eventual reboot of an affected device. The vulnerability only applies to IPv6 protocol packets and not for IPv4 protocol packets. This vulnerability affects Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in ACI Mode running software version 13.0(1k). The vulnerability can only be exploited when unicast routing is enabled on the Bridge Domain (BD). DHCP and DHCP relay do not have to be configured for the vulnerability to be exploited. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvg38918.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2018-07-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / nx-os / 13.0(1k)

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.