CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0230 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the internal packet-processing functionality of Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software for Cisco Firepower 2100 Series Security Appliances could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to stop processing traffic, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to the affected software improperly validating IP Version 4 (IPv4) and IP Version 6 (IPv6) packets after the software reassembles the packets (following IP Fragmentation). An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of malicious, fragmented IPv4 or IPv6 packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause Snort processes on the affected device to hang at 100% CPU utilization, which could cause the device to stop processing traffic and result in a DoS condition until the device is reloaded manually. This vulnerability affects Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software Releases 6.2.1 and 6.2.2, if the software is running on a Cisco Firepower 2100 Series Security Appliance. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCvf91098.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2018-04-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.1
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.2
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.8(2)

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

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