CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2020-3188 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability
A vulnerability in how Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software handles session timeouts for management connections could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a buildup of remote management connections to an affected device, which could result in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability exists because the default session timeout period for specific to-the-box remote management connections is too long. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large and sustained number of crafted remote management connections to an affected device, resulting in a buildup of those connections over time. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the remote management interface or Cisco Firepower Device Manager (FDM) to stop responding and cause other management functions to go offline, resulting in a DoS condition. The user traffic that is flowing through the device would not be affected, and the DoS condition would be isolated to remote management only.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.3 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-05-06
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-399, CWE-613
Affected products
- cisco / firepower_threat_defense
- cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 9.8(3)
- cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 101.6(1.96)
- cisco / asa_5510_firmware / 9.8(3)
- cisco / asa_5510_firmware / 101.6(1.96)
- cisco / asa_5512-x_firmware / 9.8(3)
Showing 6 representative product identities from 26 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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