CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-20870 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the egress MPLS packet processing function of Cisco IOS XE Software for Cisco Catalyst 3650, Catalyst 3850, and Catalyst 9000 Family Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of IPv4 traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malformed packet out of an affected MPLS-enabled interface. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2022-10-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-130

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe

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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