CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15458 — Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the Shell Access Filter feature of Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), when used in conjunction with remote authentication, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause high disk utilization, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability occurs because the configuration of the Shell Access Filter, when used with a specific type of remote authentication, can cause a system file to have unbounded writes. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a steady stream of remote authentication requests to the appliance when the specific configuration is applied. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to increase the size of a system log file so that it consumes most of the disk space. The lack of available disk space could lead to a DoS condition in which the device functions could operate abnormally, making the device unstable.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.0)
Published
2019-01-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.2.2
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.2.3
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.3.0

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.