CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15397 — Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.1

A vulnerability in the implementation of Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) over IPsec functionality in 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 restart unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to an error that may occur if the affected software renegotiates the encryption key for an IPsec tunnel when certain TFC traffic is in flight. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious stream of TFC traffic through an established IPsec tunnel on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a daemon process on the affected device to crash, which could cause the device to crash and result in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.1 (2.0)
Published
2018-10-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-320

Affected products

  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.2.2
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.6.4
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.8.2
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.9.1
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.9.1(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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