CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0421 — Cisco Prime Access Registrar security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in TCP connection management in Cisco Prime Access Registrar could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition when the application unexpectedly restarts. The vulnerability is due to incorrect handling of incoming TCP SYN packets to specific listening ports. The improper handling of the TCP SYN packets could cause a system file description to be allocated and not freed. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted stream of TCP SYN packets to the application. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the application to eventually restart if a file description cannot be obtained.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2018-10-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-772

Affected products

  • cisco / prime_access_registrar
  • cisco / prime_access_registrar_jumpstart

Showing 2 representative product identities from 4 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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