Cisco Wireless LAN Controller Denial of Service Vulnerability

A vulnerability in the wireless intrusion detection (WIDS) feature of the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to force the WLC to become unresponsive.

For a Cisco WLC with a default configuration, the attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of crafted packets to an affected WLC. The attack requires an administrator to click the IDS events under Security > Wireless Protection Policies > Signature Events Summary in the WLC admin web interface. When the administrator clicks the IDS events after the attacker sends the crafted packets, the WLC becomes unresponsive and all wireless clients are disconnected.

This vulnerability was found and reported to Cisco by Darren Johnson.

Cisco has confirmed the vulnerability in a security notice and released software updates.

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be on the same broadcast or collision domain as the targeted device to send a large number of crafted packets to the device. This access requirement may reduce the likelihood of a successful exploit.

Cisco indicates through the CVSS score that functional exploit code exists; however, the code is not known to be publicly available.