CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1615 — Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the packet processing functionality of Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller (EWC) Software for Catalyst Access Points (APs) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected AP. This vulnerability is due to insufficient buffer allocation. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted traffic to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust available resources and cause a DoS condition on an affected AP, as well as a DoS condition for client traffic traversing the AP.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-410

Affected products

  • cisco / embedded_wireless_controller

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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