CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3196 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) handler of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust memory resources on the affected device, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to improper resource management for inbound SSL/TLS connections. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by establishing multiple SSL/TLS connections with specific conditions to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the memory on the affected device, causing the device to stop accepting new SSL/TLS connections and resulting in a DoS condition for services on the device that process SSL/TLS traffic. Manual intervention is required to recover an affected device.

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

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense
  • cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 9.4(4)
  • cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 9.8(4.18)
  • cisco / asa_5505_firmware / 100.13(0)
  • cisco / asa_5510_firmware / 9.4(4)
  • cisco / asa_5510_firmware / 9.8(4.18)

Showing 6 representative product identities from 46 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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