CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-1721 — Cisco Telepresence Video Communication Server security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.7

A vulnerability in the phone book feature of Cisco Expressway Series and Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to cause the CPU to increase to 100% utilization, causing a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected system. The vulnerability is due to improper handling of the XML input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) message with a crafted XML payload to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust CPU resources, resulting in a DoS condition. Manual intervention may be required to recover the device. This vulnerability is fixed in Cisco Expressway Series and Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server Releases X12.5.1 and later.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.7 (3.0)
Published
2019-04-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / telepresence_video_communication_server

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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