CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0233 — Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) packet reassembly functionality of the detection engine in Cisco Firepower System Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the detection engine to consume excessive system memory on an affected device, which could cause a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to the affected software improperly handling changes to SSL connection states. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted SSL connections through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the detection engine to consume excessive system memory on the affected device, which could cause a DoS condition. The device may need to be reloaded manually to recover from this condition. This vulnerability affects Cisco Firepower System Software Releases 6.0.0 and later, running on any of the following Cisco products: Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500-X Series Firewalls with FirePOWER Services, Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Networks, 7000 Series Appliances, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Networks…

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 / secure_firewall_management_center / 5.4.0
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.0.0
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.1.0
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.2.0
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.2.1

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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