Vulnerability Note VU#642076

Cisco Intrusion Prevention System administration interface fails to properly handle Secure Socket Layer packets

Original Release date: 22 Sep 2006 | Last revised: 26 Sep 2006

Overview

The web administration interface of Cisco Intrusion Prevention System and Intrusion Detection System devices fails to properly handle certain Secure Socket Layer packets. This vulnerability may cause a denial of service.

Description

According to Cisco Security Advisory cisco-sa-20060920-ips:

    It is possible to send a malformed SSLv2 Client Hello packet to the IPS/IDS web administration interface, which may cause the process (mainApp) responsible for managing remote access to fail. This results in an IPS/IDS device becoming unresponsive to all future remote management requests through the web administration interface or the command-line interface (CLI) via SSH and the console.

The specific nature of the malformed packets that exploit this vulnerability is unknown. Vulnerable products include Cisco IDS 4.1(x) software prior to 4.1(5c), Cisco IPS 5.0(x) software prior to 5.0(6p1), and Cisco IPS 5.1(x) software prior to 5.1(2).

Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker could cause the administrative interface of an affected device to become unavailable, leading to various secondary denial of service impacts.

Solution

Upgrade
Cisco has made fixed versions of the software available to address these vulnerabilities. For more information see Cisco Security Advisory cisco-sa-20060920-ips.

Apply Access Control List


Users that are unable to upgrade should apply an access control list (ACL) on the vulnerable device to restrict access to trusted management systems. Details on creating and uploading an ACL can be found in Cisco's Product Configuration Guide.

Systems Affected (Learn More)

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
Cisco Systems, Inc.Affected-20 Sep 2006
If you are a vendor and your product is affected, let us know.

CVSS Metrics (Learn More)

Group Score Vector
Base N/A N/A
Temporal N/A N/A
Environmental N/A N/A

References

Credit

This issue was reported in Cisco Security Advisory cisco-sa-20060920-ips.

This document was written by Chris Taschner.

Other Information

  • CVE IDs: CVE-2006-4910
  • Date Public: 20 Sep 2006
  • Date First Published: 22 Sep 2006
  • Date Last Updated: 26 Sep 2006
  • Severity Metric: 3.66
  • Document Revision: 20

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