Cisco Discovery Protocol Vulnerability Could Lead to Reload and Limited Remote Code Execution

CVE-2022-20846

Summary

A flaw exists in the Cisco Discovery Protocol implementation within Cisco IOS XR Software, allowing unauthenticated adjacent attackers to exploit this vulnerability. The vulnerability is the result of a heap buffer overflow caused by processing malicious packets sent to devices running the affected software. By sending specially crafted Cisco Discovery Protocol packets, attackers could potentially cause the process associated with this protocol to reload. Although the ability to execute remote code is limited due to restrictions on writeable bytes, the reloading of the process could still disrupt network operations. Cisco has released necessary software updates to mitigate this vulnerability, and no alternative workarounds are available.

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