CVE-2021-1523
A vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a queue wedge on a leaf switch, which could result in critical control plane traffic to the device being dropped. This could result in one or more leaf switches being removed from the fabric. This vulnerability is due to mishandling of ingress TCP traffic to a specific port. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a stream of TCP packets to a specific port on a Switched Virtual Interface (SVI) configured on the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a specific packet queue to queue network buffers but never process them, leading to an eventual queue wedge. This could cause control plane traffic to be dropped, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition where the leaf switches are unavailable. Note: This vulnerability requires a manual intervention to power-cycle the device to recover.
EPSS 0.54% · 67.9th percentile
Risk Scores
Affected Products
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Cisco | Cisco NX-OS System Software in ACI Mode | n/a |
| cisco | nx-os | 13.2\(3n\), * |
Exploit Intelligence
Timeline
- Aug 25, 2021 CVE Published
- Aug 26, 2021 EPSS Score
- Aug 26, 2021 PoC Published
- Oct 23, 2021 EPSS Score
- Dec 20, 2021 EPSS Score
- Jan 6, 2022 EPSS Score
- Feb 17, 2022 EPSS Score
- Apr 1, 2022 EPSS Score
- Apr 16, 2022 EPSS Score
- Jun 13, 2022 EPSS Score
- Aug 11, 2022 EPSS Score
- Oct 8, 2022 EPSS Score
References
- 20210825 Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode Queue Wedge Denial of Service Vulnerability vendor-advisory
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-1523 advisory
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-nxos-ngoam-dos-LTDb9Hv advisory
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-nxos-mpls-oam-dos-sGO9x5GM advisory
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-n9kaci-tcp-dos-YXukt6gM advisory
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-capic-frw-Nt3RYxR2 advisory
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-capic-chvul-CKfGYBh8 advisory
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-capic-pesc-pkmGK4J advisory