CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3398 — 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 a BGP session to repeatedly reset, causing a partial denial of service (DoS) condition due to the BGP session being down. The vulnerability is due to incorrect parsing of a specific type of BGP MVPN update message. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending this BGP MVPN update message to a targeted device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the BGP peer connections to reset, which could lead to BGP route instability and impact traffic. The incoming BGP MVPN update message is valid but is parsed incorrectly by the NX-OS device, which could send a corrupted BGP update to the configured BGP peer. 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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