CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20304 — Cisco Ios Xr security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the multicast traceroute version 2 (Mtrace2) feature of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust the UDP packet memory of an affected device. This vulnerability exists because the Mtrace2 code does not properly handle packet memory. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the incoming UDP packet memory. The affected device would not be able to process higher-level UDP-based protocols packets, possibly causing a denial of service (DoS) condition. Note: This vulnerability can be exploited using IPv4 or IPv6.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2024-09-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.7.1
  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.7.2
  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.7.21
  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.8.1
  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.8.2
  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.8.12

Showing 6 representative product identities from 18 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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