A vulnerability in Cisco Unified Threat Defense (UTD) Snort Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) Engine for Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass configured security policies or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of HTTP requests when they are processed by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a reload of the Snort process. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to the default, fail-open, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow the attacker to bypass configured security policies. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to fail-close, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could cause traffic that is configured to be inspected by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine to be dropped.

Multiple Cisco products are affected by vulnerabilities in the Snort detection engine that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass a configured file policy for HTTP. These vulnerabilities are due to incorrect handling of specific HTTP header parameters. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending crafted HTTP packets through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to bypass a configured file policy for HTTP packets and deliver a malicious payload. Cisco has released software updates that address these vulnerabilities. There are no workarounds that address these vulnerabilities. This advisory is available at the following link:https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-http-fp-bp-KfDdcQhc