CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-0240 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

Multiple vulnerabilities in the Application Layer Protocol Inspection feature of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a reload of an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerabilities are due to logical errors during traffic inspection. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending a high volume of malicious traffic across an affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause a deadlock condition, resulting in a reload of an affected device. These vulnerabilities affect Cisco ASA Software and Cisco FTD Software configured for Application Layer Protocol Inspection running on the following Cisco products: 3000 Series Industrial Security Appliance (ISA), ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances, ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls, ASA Services Module for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance (ASAv), Firepower 2100 Series Security Appliance, Firepower 4100 Series Security Appliance, Firepower 9300 ASA Security Module, FTD Virtual…

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2018-04-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software

Showing 2 representative product identities from 7 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

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