A vulnerability in the Protocol Independent Multicast Version 6 (PIM6) feature of Cisco Nexus 3000 Series Switches and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches in standalone NX-OS mode could allow an authenticated, low-privileged, remote attacker to trigger a crash of the PIM6 process, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.
This vulnerability is due to improper processing of PIM6 ephemeral data queries. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted ephemeral query to an affected device through one of the following methods: NX-API REST, NETCONF, RESTConf, gRPC, or Model Driven Telemetry. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the PIM6 process to crash and restart, causing potential adjacency flaps and resulting in a DoS of the PIM6 and ephemeral query processes.
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.