CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-34698 — Cisco Asyncos security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the proxy service of Cisco AsyncOS for Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust system memory and cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper memory management in the proxy service of an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by establishing a large number of HTTPS connections to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the system to stop processing new connections, which could result in a DoS condition. Note: Manual intervention may be required to recover from this situation.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-10-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • cisco / asyncos

Showing 1 representative product identities from 3 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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