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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2017-3863

High
8.6/10

Summary

Multiple vulnerabilities in the EnergyWise module of Cisco IOS (12.2 and 15.0 through 15.6) and Cisco IOS XE (3.2 through 3.18) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a buffer overflow condition or a reload of an affected device, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition. These vulnerabilities are due to improper parsing of crafted EnergyWise packets destined to an affected device. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending crafted EnergyWise packets to be processed by an affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause a buffer overflow condition or a reload of the affected device, leading to a DoS condition. Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software support EnergyWise for IPv4 communication. Only IPv4 packets destined to a device configured as an EnergyWise domain member can trigger these vulnerabilities. IPv6 packets cannot be used to trigger these vulnerabilities. Cisco Bug ID CSCut50727.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • CHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-119 - Buffer Overflow

Buffer overflow attacks involve data transit and operations exceeding the restricted memory buffer, thereby corrupting or overwriting data in adjacent memory locations. Such overflow allows the attacker to run arbitrary code or manipulate the existing code to cause privilege escalation, data breach, denial of service, system crash and even complete system compromise. Given that languages such as C and C++ lack default safeguards against overwriting or accessing data in their memory, applications utilizing these languages are most susceptible to buffer overflows attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published