CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-12677 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.7

A vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN feature of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition that prevents the creation of new SSL/Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections to an affected device. The vulnerability is due to incorrect handling of Base64-encoded strings. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by opening many SSL VPN sessions to an affected device. The attacker would need to have valid user credentials on the affected device to exploit this vulnerability. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to overwrite a special system memory location, which will eventually result in memory allocation errors for new SSL/TLS sessions to the device, preventing successful establishment of these sessions. A reload of the device is required to recover from this condition. Established SSL/TLS connections to the device and SSL/TLS connections through the device are not affected. Note: Although this vulnerability is in the SSL VPN feature, successful exploitation of this vulnerability would affect all new SSL/TLS sessions to the device, including management sessio…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.7 (3.0)
Published
2019-10-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-172, CWE-755

Affected products

  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software

Showing 1 representative product identities from 6 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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