CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3422 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the IP Service Level Agreement (SLA) responder feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the IP SLA responder to reuse an existing port, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability exists because the IP SLA responder could consume a port that could be used by another feature. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specific IP SLA control packets to the IP SLA responder on an affected device. The control packets must include the port number that could be used by another configured feature. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an in-use port to be consumed by the IP SLA responder, impacting the feature that was using the port and resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.0)
Published
2020-09-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-371

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.9.3

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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