CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-23552 — F5 Big-Ip Advanced Web Application Firewall security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

On versions 17.0.x before 17.0.0.2, 16.1.x before 16.1.3.3, 15.1.0 before 15.1.8, 14.1.x before 14.1.5.3, and all versions of 13.1.x, when a BIG-IP Advanced WAF or BIG-IP ASM security policy is configured on a virtual server, undisclosed requests can cause an increase in memory resource utilization. Note: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-02-01
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • f5 / big-ip_advanced_web_application_firewall
  • f5 / big-ip_application_security_manager

Showing 2 representative product identities from 10 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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