CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-20692 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.7

A vulnerability in the NETCONF over SSH feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow a low-privileged, authenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service condition (DoS) on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient resource management. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by initiating a large number of NETCONF over SSH connections. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources, causing the device to reload and resulting in a DoS condition on an affected device.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.7 (3.1)
Published
2022-04-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 3.15.1xbs
  • cisco / ios_xe / 3.15.2xbs
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.3.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.3.1a
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.3.2
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.3.3

Showing 6 representative product identities from 127 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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