CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1611 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in Ethernet over GRE (EoGRE) packet processing of Cisco IOS XE Wireless Controller Software for the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Family Wireless Controller, Embedded Wireless Controller, and Embedded Wireless on Catalyst 9000 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper processing of malformed EoGRE packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malicious packets to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-399

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe

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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