CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3397 — Cisco Nx-Os security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Multicast VPN (MVPN) implementation of Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to unexpectedly reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incomplete input validation of a specific type of BGP MVPN update message. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending this specific, valid BGP MVPN update message to a targeted device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause one of the BGP-related routing applications to restart multiple times, leading to a system-level restart. Note: The Cisco implementation of BGP accepts incoming BGP traffic from only explicitly configured peers. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must send a specific BGP MVPN update message over an established TCP connection that appears to come from a trusted BGP peer. To do so, the attacker must obtain information about the BGP peers in the trusted network of the affected system.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-08-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / nx-os

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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