CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3189 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the VPN System Logging functionality for Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a memory leak that can deplete system memory over time, which can cause unexpected system behaviors or device crashes. The vulnerability is due to the system memory not being properly freed for a VPN System Logging event generated when a VPN session is created or deleted. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by repeatedly creating or deleting a VPN tunnel connection, which could leak a small amount of system memory for each logging event. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause system memory depletion, which can lead to a systemwide denial of service (DoS) condition. The attacker does not have any control of whether VPN System Logging is configured or not on the device, but it is enabled by default.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-401

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.3.12
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.3.13
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.3.14
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.2.3.15
  • cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 9.9(2)
  • cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 9.9(2.21)

Showing 6 representative product identities from 52 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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