CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-12698 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

A vulnerability in the WebVPN feature of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause increased CPU utilization on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to excessive processing load for a specific WebVPN HTTP page request. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending multiple WebVPN HTTP page load requests for a specific URL. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to increase CPU load on the device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition, which could cause traffic to be delayed through the device.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2019-10-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense

Showing 3 representative product identities from 9 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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