CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3134 — Cisco Email Security Appliance security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

A vulnerability in the zip decompression engine of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of zip files. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending an email message with a crafted zip-compressed attachment. A successful exploit could trigger a restart of the content-scanning process, causing a temporary DoS condition. This vulnerability affects Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco ESA releases earlier than 13.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-01-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / email_security_appliance

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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