CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3559 — Cisco Wireless Lan Controller security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in Cisco Aironet Access Point (AP) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to reload. The vulnerability is due to improper handling of clients that are trying to connect to the AP. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending authentication requests from multiple clients to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-09-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / wireless_lan_controller
  • cisco / business_access_points
  • cisco / access_points
  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 8.5(151.0)
  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 17.2.0.26

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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