CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1587 — Cisco Nx-Os security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the VXLAN Operation, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) feature of Cisco NX-OS Software, known as NGOAM, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of specific packets with a Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) OAM EtherType. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted packets, including the TRILL OAM EtherType of 0x8902, to a device that is part of a VXLAN Ethernet VPN (EVPN) fabric. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an affected device to experience high CPU usage and consume excessive system resources, which may result in overall control plane instability and cause the affected device to reload. Note: The NGOAM feature is disabled by default.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-115, CWE-436

Affected products

  • cisco / nx-os

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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