Cisco Identity Services Engine RADIUS Denial of Service Vulnerability
cisco-sa-ise-radius-dos-W7cNn7gt · High · Published · Updated
A vulnerability in the RADIUS message processing feature of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the affected system to stop processing RADIUS packets. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of certain RADIUS accounting requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted authentication request to a network access device (NAD) that uses Cisco ISE for authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA). This would eventually result in the NAD sending a RADIUS accounting request packet to Cisco ISE. An attacker could also exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted RADIUS accounting request packet to Cisco ISE directly if the RADIUS shared secret is known. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the RADIUS process to unexpectedly restart, resulting in authentication or authorization timeouts and denying legitimate users access to the network or service. Clients already authenticated to the network would not be affected. Note: To recover the ability to process RADIUS packets, a manual restart of the affected Policy Service Node (PSN) may be required. For more information, see the Details section of this advisory. 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-ise-radius-dos-W7cNn7gt
There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability. However, several potential mitigations may help address this vulnerability.
To mitigate this vulnerability, customers can turn off RADIUS accounting on the network access device (NAD) sending the crafted packets to the Cisco ISE PSN. There may be other mitigations for this vulnerability for customers who cannot upgrade to a fixed release. To coordinate implementation of the mitigations, contact the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) https://www.cisco.com/go/tac/ .
While these mitigations have been deployed and were proven successful in a test environment, customers should determine the applicability and effectiveness in their own environment and under their own use conditions. Customers should be aware that any workaround or mitigation that is implemented may negatively impact the functionality or performance of their network based on intrinsic customer deployment scenarios and limitations. Customers should not deploy any workarounds or mitigations before first evaluating the applicability to their own environment and any impact to such environment.