CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-27124 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the SSL/TLS handler of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the affected device to reload unexpectedly, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to improper error handling on established SSL/TLS connections. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by establishing an SSL/TLS connection with the affected device and then sending a malicious SSL/TLS message within that connection. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to reload.Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2024-11-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-457

Affected products

  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.13.1.12
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.13.1.13
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software / 9.14.1.10

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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