CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20197 — Cisco Secure Endpoint security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the filesystem image parser for Hierarchical File System Plus (HFS+) of ClamAV could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to an incorrect check for completion when a file is decompressed, which may result in a loop condition that could cause the affected software to stop responding. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted HFS+ filesystem image to be scanned by ClamAV on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the ClamAV scanning process to stop responding, resulting in a DoS condition on the affected software and consuming available system resources. For a description of this vulnerability, see the ClamAV blog .

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-08-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

Affected products

  • cisco / secure_endpoint
  • cisco / secure_endpoint_private_cloud
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 38

Showing 3 representative product identities from 6 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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