CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20031 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.4

A vulnerability in the SSL/TLS certificate handling of Snort 3 Detection Engine integration with Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the Snort 3 detection engine to restart. This vulnerability is due to a logic error that occurs when an SSL/TLS certificate that is under load is accessed when it is initiating an SSL connection. Under specific, time-based constraints, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high rate of SSL/TLS connection requests to be inspected by the Snort 3 detection engine on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the Snort 3 detection engine to reload, resulting in either a bypass or a denial of service (DoS) condition, depending on device configuration. The Snort detection engine will restart automatically. No manual intervention is required.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.4 (3.1)
Published
2023-11-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-244

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.7.0
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.7.0.1
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.7.0.2
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 6.7.0.3
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 7.0.0
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 7.0.0.1

Showing 6 representative product identities from 15 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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.