Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode BGP Route Installation Denial of Service (CVE-2021-1230)

high Tenable OT Security Plugin ID 501272

Synopsis

The remote OT asset is affected by a vulnerability.

Description

A vulnerability with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a routing process to crash, which could lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to an issue with the installation of routes upon receipt of a BGP update. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted BGP update to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the routing process to crash, which could cause the device to reload. This vulnerability applies to both Internal BGP (IBGP) and External BGP (EBGP). Note: The Cisco implementation of BGP accepts incoming BGP traffic from explicitly configured peers only. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need to send a specific BGP update message over an established TCP connection that appears to come from a trusted BGP peer.

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Solution

Refer to the vendor advisory.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 501272

Version: 1.2

Type: remote

Family: Tenable.ot

Published: 7/25/2023

Updated: 10/16/2025

Supported Sensors: Tenable OT Security

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3.6

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.1

Temporal Score: 5.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2021-1230

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:cisco:nexus_9000_series_switches

Required KB Items: Tenable.ot/Cisco

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 2/24/2021

Vulnerability Publication Date: 2/24/2021

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2021-1230

Detections

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