CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-15462 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the TCP ingress handler for the data interfaces that are configured with management access to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an increase in CPU and memory usage, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to insufficient ingress TCP rate limiting for TCP ports 22 (SSH) and 443 (HTTPS). An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted, steady stream of TCP traffic to port 22 or 443 on the data interfaces that are configured with management access to the affected device.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2019-05-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 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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