CVE-2017-12319 – Cisco Releases Security Update for IOS XE Software

A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) over an Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) for Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition, or potentially corrupt the BGP routing table, which could result in network instability.

The vulnerability exists due to changes in the implementation of the BGP MPLS-Based Ethernet VPN RFC (RFC 7432) draft between IOS XE software releases. When the BGP Inclusive Multicast Ethernet Tag Route or BGP EVPN MAC/IP Advertisement Route update packet is received, it could be possible that the IP address length field is miscalculated. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted BGP packet to an affected device after the BGP session was established. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload or corrupt the BGP routing table; either outcome would result in a DoS.

The Cisco implementation of the BGP protocol only accepts incoming BGP traffic from explicitly defined peers. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be able to send the malicious packets over a TCP connection that appears to come from a trusted BGP peer, or inject malformed messages into the victim’s BGP network. This would require obtaining information about the BGP peers in the affected system’s trusted network.

The vulnerability may be triggered when the router receives a crafted BGP message from a peer on an existing BGP session. At least one BGP neighbor session must be established for a router to be vulnerable.

There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

This vulnerability affects all releases of Cisco IOS XE Software prior to software release 16.3 that support BGP EVPN configurations. If the device is not configured for EVPN, it is not vulnerable.




Determining the Cisco IOS XE Software Release

To determine which Cisco IOS XE Software release is running on a device, administrators can log in to the device, use the show version command in the CLI, and then refer to the system banner that appears. If the device is running Cisco IOS XE Software, the system banner displays Cisco IOS Software, Cisco IOS XE Software, or similar text.

The following example shows the output of the command for a device that is running Cisco IOS XE Software Release 16.2.1 and has an installed image name of CAT3K_CAA-UNIVERSALK9-M:

ios-xe-device# show version

Cisco IOS Software, Catalyst L3 Switch Software (CAT3K_CAA-UNIVERSALK9-M), Version Denali 16.2.1, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Technical Support: http://www.cisco.com/techsupport
Copyright (c) 1986-2016 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Sun 27-Mar-16 21:47 by mcpre
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For information about the naming and numbering conventions for Cisco IOS XE Software releases, see White Paper: Cisco IOS and NX-OS Software Reference Guide. For additional information on EVPN configurations, see Carrier Ethernet Configuration Guide.

This vulnerability is fixed in IOS XE software releases 16.3 and later.