CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15443 — Cisco Firepower System Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the detection engine of Cisco Firepower System Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass a configured Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) rule that inspects certain types of TCP traffic. The vulnerability is due to incorrect TCP retransmission handling. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted TCP connection request through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to bypass configured IPS rules and allow uninspected traffic onto the network.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.0)
Published
2018-11-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_system_software

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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