CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20083 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in ICMPv6 inspection when configured with the Snort 2 detection engine for Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the CPU of an affected device to spike to 100 percent, which could stop all traffic processing and result in a denial of service (DoS) condition. FTD management traffic is not affected by this vulnerability. This vulnerability is due to improper error checking when parsing fields within the ICMPv6 header. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted ICMPv6 packet through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to exhaust CPU resources and stop processing traffic, resulting in a DoS condition. Note: To recover from the DoS condition, the Snort 2 Detection Engine or the Cisco FTD device may need to be restarted.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2023-11-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense

Showing 1 representative product identities from 8 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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