CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3334 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the ARP packet processing of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software for Cisco Firepower 2100 Series Security Appliances could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause an affected device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to incorrect processing of ARP packets received by the management interface of an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of unicast ARP packets in a short timeframe that would reach the management interface of an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to consume resources on an affected device, which would prevent the device from sending internal system keepalives and eventually cause the device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense

Showing 2 representative product identities from 4 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.