CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-40116 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

Multiple Cisco products are affected by a vulnerability in Snort rules that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device.The vulnerability is due to improper handling of the Block with Reset or Interactive Block with Reset actions if a rule is configured without proper constraints. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IP packet to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause through traffic to be dropped. Note: Only products with Snort3 configured and either a rule with Block with Reset or Interactive Block with Reset actions configured are vulnerable. Products configured with Snort2 are not vulnerable.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-10-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-241

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 3.1.0.1
  • cisco / snort

Showing 3 representative product identities from 6 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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