CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-15261 — Cisco Aironet 1810 Firmware security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) VPN packet processing functionality in Cisco Aironet Access Points (APs) 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 insufficient validation of Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) frames that pass through the data plane of an affected AP. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by associating to a vulnerable AP, initiating a PPTP VPN connection to an arbitrary PPTP VPN server, and sending a malicious GRE frame through the data plane of the AP. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an internal process of the targeted AP to crash, which in turn would cause the AP to reload. The AP reload would cause a DoS condition for clients that are associated with the AP.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2019-10-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / aironet_1810_firmware
  • cisco / aironet_1830_firmware
  • cisco / aironet_1850_firmware

Showing 3 representative product identities from 9 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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