CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0378 — Cisco Nx-Os security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) feature of Cisco Nexus 5500, 5600, and 6000 Series Switches running Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to a lack of protection against PTP frame flood attacks. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending large streams of malicious IPv4 or IPv6 PTP traffic to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a DoS condition, impacting the traffic passing through the device.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2018-10-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / nx-os / 7.3(2)n1(0.8)

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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