CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1312 — Cisco Elastic Services Controller security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the system resource management of Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) to the health monitor API on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to inadequate provisioning of kernel parameters for the maximum number of TCP connections and SYN backlog. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a flood of crafted TCP packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to block TCP listening ports that are used by the health monitor API. This vulnerability only affects customers who use the health monitor API.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-01-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / elastic_services_controller

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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