CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20108 — Cisco Unified Communications Manager Im And Presence Service security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the XCP Authentication Service of the Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM & Presence Service (Unified CM IM&P) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a temporary service outage for all Cisco Unified CM IM&P users who are attempting to authenticate to the service, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper validation of user-supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted login message to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an unexpected restart of the authentication service, preventing new users from successfully authenticating. Exploitation of this vulnerability does not impact Cisco Unified CM IM&P users who were authenticated prior to an attack.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-06-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-789, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / unified_communications_manager_im_and_presence_service / 12.5(1)
  • cisco / unified_communications_manager_im_and_presence_service / 14su

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.