CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-26070 — Cisco Ios Xr security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the ingress packet processing function of Cisco IOS XR Software for Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to improper resource allocation when an affected device processes network traffic in software switching mode (punted). An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specific streams of Layer 2 or Layer 3 protocol data units (PDUs) to an affected device. A successful exploit could cause the affected device to run out of buffer resources, which could make the device unable to process or forward traffic, resulting in a DoS condition. The device would need to be restarted to regain functionality.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-11-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-404

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr

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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