CVE-2021-1523

HIGH

Cisco Nx-os - Resource Leak

Title source: rule

Description

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.

Scores

CVSS v3 8.6
EPSS 0.0054
EPSS Percentile 67.2%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

Classification

CWE
CWE-772
Status published

Affected Products (2)

cisco/nx-os
cisco/nx-os

Timeline

Published Aug 25, 2021
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026