CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-20915 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the implementation of IPv6 VPN over MPLS (6VPE) with Zone-Based Firewall (ZBFW) of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper error handling of an IPv6 packet that is forwarded from an MPLS and ZBFW-enabled interface in a 6VPE deployment. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPv6 packet sourced from a device on the IPv6-enabled virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) interface through the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to reload the device, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2022-10-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-115, CWE-436

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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