CVE-2021-1402
Published: 29 April 2021
Summary
CVE-2021-1402 is a high-severity Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer (CWE-119) vulnerability in Cisco Firepower Threat Defense. Its CVSS base score is 8.6 (High).
Operationally, ranked in the top 31.4% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2021-6869
Vulnerability details
A vulnerability in the software-based SSL/TLS message handler of Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a reload of an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is…
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due to insufficient validation of SSL/TLS messages when the device performs software-based SSL decryption. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted SSL/TLS message through an affected device. SSL/TLS messages sent to an affected device do not trigger this vulnerability. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a process to crash. This crash would then trigger a reload of the device. No manual intervention is needed to recover the device after the reload.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Security testing and evaluation at multiple SDLC stages directly detects missing or flawed input validation, with the required remediation process ensuring fixes are applied.
Security testing and developer training directly verify and enforce proper input validation, reducing exploitability of injection and malformed-data weaknesses.
Managed runtimes used by platform-independent applications (e.g., JVM, CLR) enforce memory safety, preventing most buffer overflows that require direct memory manipulation.
Directly implements checks on information inputs to reject invalid data before processing.
Memory protections (e.g., W^X, ASLR) make exploitation of buffer-boundary violations far harder to turn into code execution.
Detects exploitation attempts that produce memory corruption, crashes, or anomalous behavior.
Spam protection mechanisms perform filtering and detection on inbound/outbound messages, directly compensating for missing or weak input validation of unsolicited content.