CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-12658 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the filesystem resource management code of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust filesystem resources on an affected device and cause a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to ineffective management of the underlying filesystem resources. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by performing specific actions that result in messages being sent to specific operating system log files. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust available filesystem space on an affected device. This could cause the device to crash and reload, resulting in a DoS condition for clients whose network traffic is transiting the device. Upon reload of the device, the impacted filesystem space is cleared, and the device will return to normal operation. However, continued exploitation of this vulnerability could cause subsequent forced crashes and reloads, which could lead to an extended DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2019-09-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.6.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.8.1

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

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