CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3560 — Cisco Wireless Lan Controller security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in Cisco Aironet Access Points (APs) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to improper resource management while processing specific packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of crafted UDP packets to a specific port on an affected device. A successful exploit could either allow the attacker to tear down the connection between the AP and the wireless LAN controller, resulting in the affected device not being able to process client traffic, or cause the vulnerable device to reload, triggering a DoS condition. After the attack, the affected device should automatically recover its normal functions without manual intervention.

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 / wireless_lan_controller_software
  • cisco / business_access_points
  • cisco / access_points
  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 8.5(154.27)
  • cisco / aironet_access_point_software / 8.8(125.0)

Showing 6 representative product identities from 12 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.