Cisco Crafted IP Option Vulnerability

Cisco has announced a Critical Vulnerability, which affects it’s routers and switches running Cisco IOS or Cisco IOS XR software. They’re vulnerable to a remotely exploitable crafted IP option Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Exploitation of the vulnerability may potentially allow for arbitrary code execution. Brian Kerb blogs about it saying Time to Reboot the Internet Again.

This is generally not something that the average user needs to worry about, but I’m blogging on it because the flaws do have the potential to cause some problems that Internet users could experience in a very real way (i.e. e-mail and Internet access temporarily goes bye-bye).

Update: there are actually 2 more vulnerability announced — Crafted TCP Packet DoS and IPv6 Header DoS