CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20089 — Cisco Nx-Os security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) feature for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a memory leak, which could result in an unexpected reload of the device. This vulnerability is due to incorrect error checking when parsing ingress LLDP packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a steady stream of crafted LLDP packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a memory leak, which could result in a denial of service (DoS) condition when the device unexpectedly reloads. Note: This vulnerability cannot be exploited by transit traffic through the device. The crafted LLDP packet must be targeted to a directly connected interface, and the attacker must be in the same broadcast domain as the affected device (Layer 2 adjacent). In addition, the attack surface for this vulnerability can be reduced by disabling LLDP on interfaces where it is not required.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2023-02-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-789, CWE-401

Affected products

  • cisco / nx-os / 15.2(1g)
  • cisco / nx-os / 15.2(2e)
  • cisco / nx-os / 15.2(2f)
  • cisco / nx-os / 15.2(2g)
  • cisco / nx-os / 15.2(2h)
  • cisco / nx-os / 15.2(3e)

Showing 6 representative product identities from 16 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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