CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2002-20001 — Balasys Dheater security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

The Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement Protocol allows remote attackers (from the client side) to send arbitrary numbers that are actually not public keys, and trigger expensive server-side DHE modular-exponentiation calculations, aka a D(HE)at or D(HE)ater attack. The client needs very little CPU resources and network bandwidth. The attack may be more disruptive in cases where a client can require a server to select its largest supported key size. The basic attack scenario is that the client must claim that it can only communicate with DHE, and the server must be configured to allow DHE.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-11-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • balasys / dheater
  • siemens / scalance_w1750d_firmware
  • suse / linux_enterprise_server / 11
  • suse / linux_enterprise_server / 12
  • suse / linux_enterprise_server / 15
  • f5 / big-ip_access_policy_manager

Showing 6 representative product identities from 64 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.