CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2020-3465 — A vulnerability in Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a device to reload
A vulnerability in Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a device to reload. The vulnerability is due to incorrect handling of certain valid, but not typical, Ethernet frames. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending the Ethernet frames onto the Ethernet segment. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.4 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-09-24
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20
Affected products
- cisco / ios_xe / 16.6.9
- cisco / ios_xe / 17.4.1
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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