CVE-2021-1523

Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode Queue Wedge Denial of Service Vulnerability

HIGH
8.6
CVSS Score
Published: August 25, 2021 at 07:10 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 03:31 AM UTC
10 products affected across 1 vendorNx OSNexus 93120TxNexus 9332Pq

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Severity
HIGH8.6
Exploit prediction
EPSS 1%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

A vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a queue wedge on a leaf switch, which could result in critical control plane traffic to the device being dropped. This could result in one or more leaf switches being removed from the fabric. This vulnerability is due to mishandling of ingress TCP traffic to a specific port. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a stream of TCP packets to a specific port on a Switched Virtual Interface (SVI) configured on the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a specific packet queue to queue network buffers but never process them, leading to an eventual queue wedge. This could cause control plane traffic to be dropped, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition where the leaf switches are unavailable. Note: This vulnerability requires a manual intervention to power-cycle the device to recover.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

cisco-nexus-93120tx (environment) · cisco-nexus-93128tx (environment) · cisco-nexus-9332pq (environment) · cisco-nexus-9372px (environment) · cisco-nexus-9372px-e (environment) · cisco-nexus-9372tx (environment) · cisco-nexus-9372tx-e (environment) · cisco-nexus-9396px (environment) · cisco-nexus-9396tx (environment)
All versions
All versions
All versions
All versions
All versions
All versions
All versions
All versions
All versions

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

8.6HIGHcisco
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
CHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-772

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