CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-3834 — An exploitable permanent denial of service vulnerability exists in Insteon Hub running firmware version 1013

High CVSS 8.7

An exploitable permanent denial of service vulnerability exists in Insteon Hub running firmware version 1013. The firmware upgrade functionality, triggered via PubNub, retrieves signed firmware binaries using plain HTTP requests. The device doesn't check the kind of firmware image that is going to be installed and thus allows for flashing any signed firmware into any MCU. Since the device contains different and incompatible MCUs, flashing one firmware to the wrong MCU will result in a permanent brick condition. To trigger this vulnerability, an attacker needs to impersonate the remote server "cache.insteon.com" and serve a signed firmware image.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.7 (3.0)
Published
2018-08-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-346

Affected products

  • insteon / hub_firmware / 1013

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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