CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3499 — Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the licensing service of Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition.The vulnerability is due to improper handling of system resource values by the affected system. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malicious requests to the targeted system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected system to become unresponsive, resulting in a DoS condition and preventing the management of dependent devices.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.2.3
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.3.0
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.4.0
  • cisco / secure_firewall_management_center / 6.5.0

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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