CVE-2021-34618 in Instant Access Point
Summary
by MITRE • 07/20/2021
A remote denial of service (DoS) vulnerability was discovered in some Aruba Instant Access Point (IAP) products in version(s): Aruba Instant 6.4.x: 6.4.4.8-4.2.4.18 and below; Aruba Instant 6.5.x: 6.5.4.18 and below; Aruba Instant 8.3.x: 8.3.0.14 and below; Aruba Instant 8.4.x: All versions; Aruba Instant 8.5.x: 8.5.0.11 and below; Aruba Instant 8.6.x: 8.6.0.7 and below; Aruba Instant 8.7.x: 8.7.1.1 and below. Aruba has released patches for Aruba Instant that address this security vulnerability.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 07/22/2021
The CVE-2021-34618 vulnerability represents a critical remote denial of service flaw affecting Aruba Instant Access Point products across multiple software versions. This vulnerability resides within the network infrastructure components that manage wireless access and authentication, creating a potential pathway for attackers to disrupt network operations without requiring authentication credentials. The affected versions span across several major release branches including 6.4.x, 6.5.x, 8.3.x, 8.4.x, 8.5.x, 8.6.x, and 8.7.x, indicating a widespread impact across the product lineage. The vulnerability manifests through improper input validation mechanisms that fail to properly handle malformed or specially crafted network packets, leading to system instability and complete service disruption.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability involves a failure in the access point's packet processing logic where specific network frames can trigger memory corruption or resource exhaustion conditions. This flaw operates at the network protocol level, specifically targeting the wireless authentication and connection management processes that occur during client association and session establishment. The vulnerability is classified under CWE-129 as an insufficient input validation issue, where the system fails to properly validate the boundaries and content of incoming network packets before processing them. Attackers can exploit this weakness by sending maliciously constructed frames to the affected access points, causing the device to crash or become unresponsive, thereby denying legitimate users access to network services.
From an operational impact perspective, this vulnerability poses significant risk to enterprise and organizational networks that rely on Aruba Instant Access Points for wireless connectivity. The remote nature of the exploit means that attackers can initiate denial of service attacks from external network locations without requiring physical access or network credentials, making the attack surface extremely broad. The affected access points may experience complete service outages, forcing network administrators to manually restart devices or implement workarounds that disrupt user productivity. This vulnerability directly impacts the availability component of the CIA triad and can be classified under ATT&CK technique T1499.004 for network disruption attacks, where adversaries target network infrastructure to prevent legitimate users from accessing services.
Organizations must prioritize immediate patch management to address this vulnerability, as Aruba has released security updates specifically designed to resolve the input validation issues. The mitigation strategy should include comprehensive network monitoring to detect potential exploitation attempts and implementation of network segmentation to limit the attack surface. Security teams should also consider deploying intrusion detection systems that can identify anomalous packet patterns associated with this vulnerability. The patching process requires careful planning due to the widespread nature of affected versions, and organizations should validate patches in controlled environments before deployment to ensure compatibility with existing network configurations. Additionally, network administrators should implement proper access controls and firewall rules to limit unnecessary exposure of affected access points to external networks, reducing the likelihood of exploitation while patches are being deployed across the enterprise infrastructure.