CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20271 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the IP packet processing of Cisco Access Point (AP) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of certain IPv4 packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPv4 packet either to or through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an affected device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, the attacker does not need to be associated with the affected AP. This vulnerability cannot be exploited by sending IPv6 packets.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-27
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe
  • cisco / business_access_points
  • cisco / wireless_lan_controller_software

Showing 3 representative product identities from 7 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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