CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-38598 — Openstack Neutron security vulnerability

Critical CVSS 9.1

OpenStack Neutron before 16.4.1, 17.x before 17.1.3, and 18.0.0 allows hardware address impersonation when the linuxbridge driver with ebtables-nft is used on a Netfilter-based platform. By sending carefully crafted packets, anyone in control of a server instance connected to the virtual switch can impersonate the hardware addresses of other systems on the network, resulting in denial of service or in some cases possibly interception of traffic intended for other destinations.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.1 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-290

Affected products

  • openstack / neutron
  • openstack / neutron / 18.0.0

Showing 2 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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