CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15373 — Cisco Ios security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the implementation of Cisco Discovery Protocol functionality in Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to exhaust memory on an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to improper memory handling by the affected software when the software processes high rates of Cisco Discovery Protocol packets that are sent to a device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high rate of Cisco Discovery Protocol packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust memory on the affected device, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.0)
Published
2018-10-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / ios / 15.5(3)s3.16
  • cisco / ios_xe / 15.5(3)s3.16

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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