CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-20625 — Cisco Firepower Extensible Operating System security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.1

A vulnerability in the Cisco Discovery Protocol service of Cisco FXOS Software and Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause the service to restart, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of Cisco Discovery Protocol messages that are processed by the Cisco Discovery Protocol service. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of malicious Cisco Discovery Protocol messages to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the Cisco Discovery Protocol service to fail and restart. In rare conditions, repeated failures of the process could occur, which could cause the entire device to restart.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.1 (2.0)
Published
2022-02-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-399

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_extensible_operating_system
  • cisco / nx-os / 8.2(7.34)
  • cisco / nx-os / 5.2(1)sv5(1.3b)
  • cisco / nx-os / 9.3(8.15)
  • cisco / nx-os / 4.0(1a)a
  • cisco / nx-os / 4.1(3f)c

Showing 6 representative product identities from 8 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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