CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3254 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

Multiple vulnerabilities in the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) inspection feature of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerabilities are due to inefficient memory management. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending crafted MGCP packets through an affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause memory exhaustion resulting in a restart of an affected device, causing a DoS condition for traffic traversing the device.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
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 / 9.10(1.3)
  • cisco / asa_5510_firmware / 9.10(1.3)
  • cisco / asa_5512-x_firmware / 9.10(1.3)
  • cisco / asa_5515-x_firmware / 9.10(1.3)
  • cisco / asa_5520_firmware / 9.10(1.3)

Showing 6 representative product identities from 20 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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.