Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-34697 - Improper Initialization vulnerability in Cisco IOS XE
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
NONE Integrity impact
NONE Availability impact
HIGH Summary
A vulnerability in the Protection Against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct denial of service (DoS) attacks to or through the affected device. This vulnerability is due to incorrect programming of the half-opened connections limit, TCP SYN flood limit, or TCP SYN cookie features when the features are configured in vulnerable releases of Cisco IOS XE Software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by attempting to flood traffic to or through the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to initiate a DoS attack to or through an affected device.
Vulnerable Configurations
| Part | Description | Count |
|---|---|---|
| OS | 7 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring when multiple processes access and manipulate the same resource concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place. The attacker can leverage a race condition by "running the race", modifying the resource and modifying the normal execution flow. For instance a race condition can occur while accessing a file, the attacker can trick the system by replacing the original file with his version and cause the system to read the malicious file.
- Leveraging Time-of-Check and Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions This attack targets a race condition occurring between the time of check (state) for a resource and the time of use of a resource. The typical example is the file access. The attacker can leverage a file access race condition by "running the race", meaning that he would modify the resource between the first time the target program accesses the file and the time the target program uses the file. During that period of time, the attacker could do something such as replace the file and cause an escalation of privilege.