CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-34697 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Protection Against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct denial of service (DoS) attacks to or through the affected device. This vulnerability is due to incorrect programming of the half-opened connections limit, TCP SYN flood limit, or TCP SYN cookie features when the features are configured in vulnerable releases of Cisco IOS XE Software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by attempting to flood traffic to or through the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to initiate a DoS attack to or through an affected device.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-665

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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