CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-3569 — Cisco IOS XR Software DVMRP Memory Exhaustion Vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6 CISA KEV

Multiple vulnerabilities in the Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) feature of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to either immediately crash the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) process or make it consume available memory and eventually crash. The memory consumption may negatively impact other processes that are running on the device. These vulnerabilities are due to the incorrect handling of IGMP packets. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending crafted IGMP traffic to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to immediately crash the IGMP process or cause memory exhaustion, resulting in other processes becoming unstable. These processes may include, but are not limited to, interior and exterior routing protocols. Cisco will release software updates that address these vulnerabilities.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-09-23
CISA KEV
Known exploited
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.1.4
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.2.3
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.3.3
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.4.2
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.5.3
  • cisco / ios_xr / 6.6.2

Showing 6 representative product identities from 14 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

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