Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-1620 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Cisco IOS

047910
CVSS 7.7 - HIGH
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
LOW
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
HIGH
network
low complexity
cisco
CWE-772

Summary

A vulnerability in the Internet Key Exchange Version 2 (IKEv2) support for the AutoReconnect feature of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to exhaust the free IP addresses from the assigned local pool. This vulnerability occurs because the code does not release the allocated IP address under certain failure conditions. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by trying to connect to the device with a non-AnyConnect client. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the IP addresses from the assigned local pool, which prevents users from logging in and leads to a denial of service (DoS) condition.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
OS
Cisco
690
Hardware
Cisco
275

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.