CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3203 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the locally significant certificate (LSC) provisioning feature of Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers that are running Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a memory leak that could lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incorrect processing of certain public key infrastructure (PKI) packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could cause an affected device to continuously consume memory, which could result in a memory allocation failure that leads to a crash and causes a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-06-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-401

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.1.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.1.2
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.1.3
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.2.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.2.2
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.3.1

Showing 6 representative product identities from 54 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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