A vulnerability in the implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet VPN (EVPN) functionality in Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to the incorrect processing of a BGP update message that contains specific EVPN attributes. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a BGP update message that contains specific EVPN attributes.

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must control a BGP speaker that has an established trusted peer connection to an affected device that is configured with the address family L2VPN EVPN to receive and process the update message. This vulnerability cannot be exploited by any data that is initiated by clients on the Layer 2 network or by peers that are not configured to accept the L2VPN EVPN address family. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the BGP process to restart unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition.

The Cisco implementation of BGP accepts incoming BGP updates only from explicitly defined peers. For this vulnerability to be exploited, the malicious BGP update message must either come from a configured, valid BGP peer or be injected by the attacker into the affected BGP network on an existing, valid TCP connection to a BGP peer.