CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1353 — Cisco Staros security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the IPv4 protocol handling of Cisco StarOS could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to a memory leak that occurs during packet processing. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of crafted IPv4 packets through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the available memory and cause an unexpected restart of the npusim process, leading to a DoS condition on the affected device.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-01-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • cisco / staros
  • cisco / virtualized_packet_core-single_instance

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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