CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20125 — A vulnerability in the local interface of Cisco BroadWorks Network Server could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust...

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the local interface of Cisco BroadWorks Network Server could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust system resources, causing a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability exists because rate limiting does not occur for certain incoming TCP connections. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high rate of TCP connections to the server. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause TCP connection resources to grow rapidly until the Cisco BroadWorks Network Server becomes unusable. Note: To recover from this vulnerability, either Cisco BroadWorks Network Server software must be restarted or the Cisco BroadWorks Network Server node must be rebooted. For more information, see the section of this advisory. Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2024-11-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

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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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