Cisco NX-OS Software Border Gateway Protocol Multicast VPN Session Denial of Service Vulnerability

A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Multicast VPN (MVPN) implementation of Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a BGP session to repeatedly reset, causing a partial denial of service (DoS) condition due to the BGP session being down.

The vulnerability is due to incorrect parsing of a specific type of BGP MVPN update message. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending this BGP MVPN update message to a targeted device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the BGP peer connections to reset, which could lead to BGP route instability and impact traffic. The incoming BGP MVPN update message is valid but is parsed incorrectly by the NX-OS device, which could send a corrupted BGP update to the configured BGP peer.

Note: The Cisco implementation of BGP accepts incoming BGP traffic from only explicitly configured peers. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must send a specific BGP MVPN update message over an established TCP connection that appears to come from a trusted BGP peer. To do so, the attacker must obtain information about the BGP peers in the trusted network of the affected system.

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-nxosbgp-mvpn-dos-K8kbCrJp [“https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-nxosbgp-mvpn-dos-K8kbCrJp”]

This advisory is part of the August 2020 Cisco FXOS and NX-OS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication, which includes seven Cisco Security Advisories that describe seven vulnerabilities. For a complete list of the advisories and links to them, see Cisco Event Response: August 2020 Cisco FXOS and NX-OS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication [“https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/viewErp.x?alertId=ERP-74239”].