CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3429 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the WPA2 and WPA3 security implementation of Cisco IOS XE Wireless Controller Software for the Cisco Catalyst 9000 Family could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to incorrect packet processing during the WPA2 and WPA3 authentication handshake when configured for dot1x or pre-shared key (PSK) authentication key management (AKM) with 802.11r BSS Fast Transition (FT) enabled. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted authentication packet to an affected device. A successful exploit could cause an affected device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.0)
Published
2020-09-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.12.1s

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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