CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1422 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.7

A vulnerability in the software cryptography module of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an authenticated, remote attacker or an unauthenticated attacker in a man-in-the-middle position to cause an unexpected reload of the device that results in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to a logic error in how the software cryptography module handles specific types of decryption errors. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malicious packets over an established IPsec connection. A successful exploit could cause the device to crash, forcing it to reload. Important: Successful exploitation of this vulnerability would not cause a compromise of any encrypted data. Note: This vulnerability affects only Cisco ASA Software Release 9.16.1 and Cisco FTD Software Release 7.0.0.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.7 (3.1)
Published
2021-07-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-617

Affected products

  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.16.1
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 7.0.0.0

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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