CVE-2021-1523Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode Queue Wedge Denial of Service Vulnerability
- 8.6HighCVSS base score
- 1.3%Exploitation in 30 daysEPSS · top 29% of all CVEs
- NoKnown exploitednot in CISA's KEV catalog
- NonePublic exploitsnone known yet
Description
A vulnerability in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a queue wedge on a leaf switch, which could result in critical control plane traffic to the device being dropped. This could result in one or more leaf switches being removed from the fabric. This vulnerability is due to mishandling of ingress TCP traffic to a specific port. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a stream of TCP packets to a specific port on a Switched Virtual Interface (SVI) configured on the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a specific packet queue to queue network buffers but never process them, leading to an eventual queue wedge. This could cause control plane traffic to be dropped, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition where the leaf switches are unavailable. Note: This vulnerability requires a manual intervention to power-cycle the device to recover.
Timeline
ID reserved
By cisco
- 10 months later
· 10 months later
Published
- 3 years later
· 3 years later
Record updated
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| ciscoCNA (assigner) | 3.1 | High8.6 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H |
| NVDNVD · Modified | 3.1 | High8.6 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 1.3% · top 29% of all CVEs (13 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: High 8.6.
Affected products
Cisco · Cisco NX-OS System Software in ACI Mode
- affected n/a
What to do
Exploitation: The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory.
References
References1
- 20210825 Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches ACI Mode Queue Wedge Denial of Service Vulnerability (opens in a new tab)vendor-advisoryx_refsource_CISCOx_transferred
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- EUVD EUVD-2021-6990 (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisories (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2021-1523)Record last updated .