CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-11462 — An issue was discovered in OpenVPN Access Server before 2.7.0 and 2.8.x before 2.8.3

High CVSS 7.5

An issue was discovered in OpenVPN Access Server before 2.7.0 and 2.8.x before 2.8.3. With the full featured RPC2 interface enabled, it is possible to achieve a temporary DoS state of the management interface when sending an XML Entity Expansion (XEE) payload to the XMLRPC based RPC2 interface. The duration of the DoS state depends on available memory and CPU speed. The default restricted mode of the RPC2 interface is NOT vulnerable.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-04
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-776

Affected products

  • openvpn / openvpn_access_server

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 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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