Home/CVE/A vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow
CVE

CVE-2021-1523

A vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow

A vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a queue wedge on a leaf switch, which could result in critical control plane traffic to the device being dropped. This could result in one or more leaf switches being removed from the fabric. This vulnerability is due to mishandling of ingress TCP traffic to a specific port.

An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a stream of TCP packets to a specific port on a Switched Virtual Interface (SVI) configured on the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a specific packet queue to queue network buffers but never process them, leading to an eventual queue wedge. This could cause control plane traffic to be dropped, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition where the leaf switches are unavailable.

Note: This vulnerability requires a manual intervention to power-cycle the device to recover.

HIGH · CVSS 8.6 EPSS 0.00537
Schedule remediation
  • SSVC automatable: yes - attacks can be scripted at scale
  • CVSS base score ≥ 7.0
Sigma rules0 YARA rules0

Affected Products & Versions

1
cisco nx-osall versions

Scoring & Timeline

8.6
HIGH · CVSS v3.1 · psirt@cisco.com
View on NVD
Attack Vector
Network Adjacent Local Physical
Attack Complexity
Low High
Privileges Required
None Low High
User Interaction
None Required
Scope
Unchanged Changed
Confidentiality
None Low High
Integrity
None Low High
Availability
None Low High
Published to NVD25 Aug 2021 · 07:15 PM
CVSS VectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
SSVC triage · cisa-vulnrichment
Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
SSVC asks the questions that actually drive patch urgency: is it being exploited, can attacks be automated, and how total is the impact.

Vendor Advisories

1
cisco-csafcisco-sa-n9kaci-queue-wedge-cLDDEfKF
🔗

References & Sources

1
Source URLs (vendor pages, mailing lists, write-ups). Exploit/PoC links are in their own section above to avoid duplication.
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