Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-0471 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Cisco IOS XE 16.6.1/16.6.2
Attack vector
ADJACENT_NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
NONE Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
COMPLETE Summary
A vulnerability in the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) module of Cisco IOS XE Software Releases 16.6.1 and 16.6.2 could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a memory leak that may lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incorrect processing of certain CDP packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending certain CDP packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could cause an affected device to continuously consume memory and eventually result in a memory allocation failure that leads to a crash, triggering a reload of the affected device.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| OS | 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.
Nessus
| NASL family | CISCO |
| NASL id | CISCO-SA-20180926-CDP-MEMLEAK.NASL |
| description | According to its self-reported version, the IOS XE is affected by one or more vulnerabilities. Please see the included Cisco BIDs and the Cisco Security Advisory for more information. |
| last seen | 2020-04-30 |
| modified | 2018-10-05 |
| plugin id | 117943 |
| published | 2018-10-05 |
| reporter | This script is Copyright (C) 2018-2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof. |
| source | https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/117943 |
| title | Cisco IOS XE Software CDP Memory Leak DoS Vulnerability (cisco-sa-20180926-cdp-memleak) |