CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1622 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Common Open Policy Service (COPS) of Cisco IOS XE Software for Cisco cBR-8 Converged Broadband Routers could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause resource exhaustion, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to a deadlock condition in the code when processing COPS packets under certain conditions. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending COPS packets with high burst rates to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the CPU to consume excessive resources, which prevents other control plane processes from obtaining resources and results in a DoS.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-833, CWE-667

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe
  • cisco / ios_xe / 17.3.1x

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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