Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-0421 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Cisco products
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
NONE Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
PARTIAL Summary
A vulnerability in TCP connection management in Cisco Prime Access Registrar could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition when the application unexpectedly restarts. The vulnerability is due to incorrect handling of incoming TCP SYN packets to specific listening ports. The improper handling of the TCP SYN packets could cause a system file description to be allocated and not freed. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted stream of TCP SYN packets to the application. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the application to eventually restart if a file description cannot be obtained.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Application | 2 |
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.