Description

Vulnerabilities in AOS-CX could allow an unauthenticated remote malicious actor to trigger a denial-of-service condition by sending specially crafted packets. Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities results in disruption of normal operation on affected devices.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "6.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-01T21:18:42.630Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-01T21:18:42.630Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A critical vulnerability within the AOS-CX operating system facilitates a remote denial-of-service (DoS) condition.\nThe vulnerability manifests as an improper handling of specially crafted packets, allowing an unauthenticated remote actor to trigger system-wide service disruption.\nAOS-CX devices are susceptible to this flaw, which requires no prior authentication or administrative privileges to execute.\nThe primary risk involves the exhaustion of system resources or the crashing of critical processes, leading to a loss of network connectivity and management accessibility.\nSuccessful exploitation results in the cessation of normal operational capabilities, necessitating a manual intervention or system reboot to restore functionality.\nThe vulnerability poses a high risk to network availability, particularly in environments where AOS-CX hardware serves as core infrastructure.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability resides within the packet processing engine of the AOS-CX network operating system. It originates from a failure in the input validation or state machine logic responsible for handling specific packet structures during the ingress phase of network traffic.\nWhen an unauthenticated remote attacker transmits a sequence of specially crafted packets to the affected AOS-CX device, the vulnerable component attempts to process these malformed inputs without sufficient bounds checking or error handling protocols.\nThe exploit sequence begins with the attacker injecting crafted traffic directed at the device's management or control plane interfaces. Because the input does not conform to expected protocol specifications, it triggers an exception during the parsing or decapsulation stage.\nThis exception handling failure leads to the destabilization of the affected process. Depending on the architecture of the specific AOS-CX module handling the packets, this can result in a segmentation fault, a buffer overflow in the packet buffer memory, or an infinite loop that consumes all available CPU cycles.\nOnce the target process enters an unstable state or terminates unexpectedly, the device loses the ability to process legitimate transit traffic or respond to management requests, effectively placing the device in a denial-of-service state.\nSince the attack can be initiated remotely without the need for authentication, the attack vector is characterized as highly accessible from any network segment capable of reaching the device interfaces. There are no privilege requirements, as the malicious payload targets the inherent vulnerability of the operating system's packet processing logic.\nPost-exploitation, the device enters a non-functional state where control plane operations are interrupted. Because the disruption is often tied to the underlying kernel or core service infrastructure, the device may require a hardware-level reset or a power-cycle to recover, as automated recovery mechanisms may be rendered ineffective by the sustained state of the process crash.\nThe technical root cause indicates a lack of robust sanitization for inbound packets, allowing a remote threat actor to manipulate internal device memory or state machine transitions through malformed data transmission."
}