CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3132 — Cisco Cloud Email Security security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.1

A vulnerability in the email message scanning feature of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a temporary denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to inadequate parsing mechanisms for specific email body components. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious email containing a high number of shortened URLs through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to consume processing resources, causing a DoS condition on an affected device. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, certain conditions beyond the control of the attacker must occur.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.1 (2.0)
Published
2020-02-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / cloud_email_security
  • cisco / email_security_appliance

Showing 2 representative product identities from 4 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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