CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15383 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

A vulnerability in the cryptographic hardware accelerator driver of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to reload, resulting in a temporary denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability exists because the affected devices have a limited amount of Direct Memory Access (DMA) memory and the affected software improperly handles resources in low-memory conditions. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a sustained, high rate of malicious traffic to an affected device to exhaust memory on the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust DMA memory on the affected device, which could cause the device to reload and result in a temporary DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2018-10-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.0
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.0.1
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.1.0
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.0
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.2
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.3

Showing 6 representative product identities from 15 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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