CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3409 — Cisco Ios security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the PROFINET feature of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause an affected device to crash and reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the device. The vulnerability is due to insufficient processing logic for crafted PROFINET packets that are sent to an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted PROFINET packets to an affected device for processing. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to crash and reload, resulting in a DoS condition on the device.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2020-09-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20, CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / ios / 15.2(7)e
  • cisco / ios_xe / 15.2(7)e
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.11.1a
  • cisco / ios / 16.11.1a

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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