CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1568 — Cisco Anyconnect Secure Mobility Client security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

A vulnerability in Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows could allow an authenticated, local attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected system. This vulnerability is due to uncontrolled memory allocation. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by copying a crafted file to a specific folder on the system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to crash the VPN Agent service when the affected application is launched, causing it to be unavailable to all users of the system. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid credentials on a multiuser Windows system.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-06-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
windows/system
Weaknesses
CWE-789

Affected products

  • cisco / anyconnect_secure_mobility_client

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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