CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-21973 — VMware vCenter Server and Cloud Foundation Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) Vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3 CISA KEV

The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains an SSRF (Server Side Request Forgery) vulnerability due to improper validation of URLs in a vCenter Server plugin. A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue by sending a POST request to vCenter Server plugin leading to information disclosure. This affects: VMware vCenter Server (7.x before 7.0 U1c, 6.7 before 6.7 U3l and 6.5 before 6.5 U3n) and VMware Cloud Foundation (4.x before 4.2 and 3.x before 3.10.1.2).

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2021-02-24
CISA KEV
Known exploited
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-918

Affected products

  • vmware / cloud_foundation
  • vmware / vcenter_server / 6.5

Showing 2 representative product identities from 43 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Server-side request forgery and unintended proxying

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Inventory server-side URL fetchers, webhooks, importers, previews, redirects, proxies, and protocol handlers reachable from untrusted input.
  • Map egress paths to internal services, metadata endpoints, loopback, private address space, and privileged control planes.
  • Review DNS resolution, redirect, proxy, credential-forwarding, and URL parsing behavior without requesting sensitive targets.

Remediate safely

  • Replace arbitrary destinations with named integrations or a strict allowlist of schemes, hosts, ports, and paths.
  • Resolve and validate every destination and redirect hop, then enforce egress policy independently of application checks.
  • Remove ambient credentials and sensitive headers from fetchers; apply response size, time, and content limits.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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