CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20070 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4

A vulnerability in the TLS 1.3 implementation of the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the Snort 3 detection engine to unexpectedly restart. This vulnerability is due to a logic error in how memory allocations are handled during a TLS 1.3 session. Under specific, time-based constraints, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted TLS 1.3 message sequence through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the Snort 3 detection engine to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. While the Snort detection engine reloads, packets going through the FTD device that are sent to the Snort detection engine will be dropped. The Snort detection engine will restart automatically. No manual intervention is required.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4 (3.1)
Published
2023-11-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-244

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 7.2.0
  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense / 7.2.0.1

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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