CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-20715 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the remote access SSL VPN features of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper validation of errors that are logged as a result of client connections that are made using remote access VPN. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted requests to an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to restart, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2022-05-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-399, CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 7.1.0
  • cisco / adaptive_security_appliance_software

Showing 3 representative product identities from 10 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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