Vulnerabilities > CVE-2011-4661 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Cisco IOS
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
NONE Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
HIGH Summary
A memory leak vulnerability exists in Cisco IOS before 15.2(1)T due to a memory leak in the HTTP PROXY Server process (aka CSCtu52820), when configured with Cisco ISR Web Security with Cisco ScanSafe and User Authenticaiton NTLM configured.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- HTTP DoS An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.