CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-16020 — Cisco Ios Xr security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

Multiple vulnerabilities in the implementation of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet VPN (EVPN) functionality in Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerabilities are due to incorrect processing of BGP update messages that contain crafted EVPN attributes. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending BGP EVPN update messages with malformed attributes to be processed by an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the BGP process to restart unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition. The Cisco implementation of BGP accepts incoming BGP traffic only from explicitly defined peers. To exploit these vulnerabilities, the malicious BGP update message would need to come from a configured, valid BGP peer, or would need to be injected by the attacker into the victim's BGP network on an existing, valid TCP connection to a BGP peer.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-01-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.6.1
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.6.2
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.6.25
  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.0.1

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

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