CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20260 — A vulnerability in the VPN and management web servers of the Cisco Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance (ASAv) and Cisco Secure Firewall...

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the VPN and management web servers of the Cisco Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance (ASAv) and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual (FTDv), formerly Cisco Firepower Threat Defense Virtual, platforms could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the virtual devices to run out of system memory, which could cause SSL VPN connection processing to slow down and eventually cease all together. This vulnerability is due to a lack of proper memory management for new incoming SSL/TLS connections on the virtual platforms. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of new incoming SSL/TLS connections to the targeted virtual platform. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to deplete system memory, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The memory could be reclaimed slowly if the attack traffic is stopped, but a manual reload may be required to restore operations quickly.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2024-10-23
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-789

Affected products

No browser-safe affected-product rows are available.

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.