Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches Bidirectional Forwarding Detection Denial of Service Vulnerability

A vulnerability in the rate limiter for Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) traffic of Cisco NX-OS Software for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause BFD traffic to be dropped on an affected device.

This vulnerability is due to a logic error in the BFD rate limiter functionality. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted stream of traffic through the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause BFD traffic to be dropped, resulting in BFD session flaps. BFD session flaps can cause route instability and dropped traffic, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability applies to both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

This advisory is available at the following link:
https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-nxos-bfd-dos-wGQXrzxn [“https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-nxos-bfd-dos-wGQXrzxn”]

This advisory is part of the February 2022 Cisco FXOS and NX-OS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication. For a complete list of the advisories and links to them, see Cisco Event Response: February 2022 Cisco FXOS and NX-OS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication [“https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/viewErp.x?alertId=ERP-74834”].