A vulnerability in the Intermediate System-to-Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocol of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation when parsing an ingress IS-IS packet. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IS-IS packet to an affected device after forming an adjacency. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. Note: The IS-IS protocol is a routing protocol. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be Layer 2-adjacent to the affected device and have formed an adjacency.
A NULL pointer dereference occurs when the application dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid, but is NULL, typically causing a crash or exit.