CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-1625 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.8

A vulnerability in the Zone-Based Policy Firewall feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to prevent the Zone-Based Policy Firewall from correctly classifying traffic. This vulnerability exists because ICMP and UDP responder-to-initiator flows are not inspected when the Zone-Based Policy Firewall has either Unified Threat Defense (UTD) or Application Quality of Experience (AppQoE) configured. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by attempting to send UDP or ICMP flows through the network. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to inject traffic through the Zone-Based Policy Firewall, resulting in traffic being dropped because it is incorrectly classified or in incorrect reporting figures being produced by high-speed logging (HSL).

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.8 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-284

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe

Matched remediation archetype

Authorization bypass, IDOR, and cross-tenant access

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Check exposure

  • Map object and action authorization checks across API, UI, batch, import/export, and background-job paths.
  • Identify tenant, ownership, role, and policy boundaries for affected resources and administrative operations.
  • Use synthetic fixtures to compare intended access matrices without accessing another user's real data.

Remediate safely

  • Enforce server-side authorization at each resource access and state transition using the authenticated principal and trusted tenant context.
  • Scope data queries by tenant and ownership; treat client-supplied identifiers, roles, and policy claims as untrusted.
  • Add deny-by-default policy tests for horizontal and vertical access across every affected transport.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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