CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-20268 — Cisco Wireless Lan Controller Software security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 4.7

A vulnerability in the packet processing functionality of Cisco access point (AP) software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to exhaust resources on an affected device.  This vulnerability is due to insufficient management of resources when handling certain types of traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of specific wireless packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to consume resources on an affected device. A sustained attack could lead to the disruption of the Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) tunnel and intermittent loss of wireless client traffic.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.7 (3.1)
Published
2023-09-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / wireless_lan_controller_software
  • cisco / catalyst_9800_embedded_wireless_controller_firmware
  • cisco / business_150ax_firmware
  • cisco / business_151axm_firmware

Showing 4 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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