CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-34714 — Cisco Fxos security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the Unidirectional Link Detection (UDLD) feature of Cisco FXOS Software, Cisco IOS Software, Cisco IOS XE Software, Cisco IOS XR Software, and Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause an affected device to reload. This vulnerability is due to improper input validation of the UDLD packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specifically crafted UDLD packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. Note: The UDLD feature is disabled by default, and the conditions to exploit this vulnerability are strict. An attacker must have full control of a directly connected device. On Cisco IOS XR devices, the impact is limited to the reload of the UDLD process.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / fxos
  • cisco / firepower_extensible_operating_system
  • cisco / ios
  • cisco / ios_xe
  • cisco / ios_xr
  • cisco / nx-os

Showing 6 representative product identities from 32 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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