CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2020-3434 — Cisco Anyconnect Secure Mobility Client security vulnerability
A vulnerability in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows could allow an authenticated, local attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker would need to have valid credentials on the Windows system. The vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPC message to the AnyConnect process on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to stop the AnyConnect process, causing a DoS condition on the device. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker would need to have valid credentials on the Windows system.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-08-17
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- windows/system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20
Affected products
- cisco / anyconnect_secure_mobility_client
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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