CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15369 — Cisco Ios security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

A vulnerability in the TACACS+ client subsystem of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to improper handling of crafted TACACS+ response packets by the affected software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by injecting a crafted TACACS+ packet into an existing TACACS+ session between an affected device and a TACACS+ server or by impersonating a known, valid TACACS+ server and sending a crafted TACACS+ packet to an affected device when establishing a connection to the device. To exploit this vulnerability by using either method, the attacker must know the shared TACACS+ secret and the crafted packet must be sent in response to a TACACS+ request from a TACACS+ client. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2018-10-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / ios / 15.6(1.9)t
  • cisco / ios_xe

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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