CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20318 — A vulnerability in the Layer 2 Ethernet services of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause...

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the Layer 2 Ethernet services of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause the line card network processor to reset, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to the incorrect handling of specific Ethernet frames that are received on line cards that have the Layer 2 services feature enabled. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specific Ethernet frames through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the ingress interface network processor to reset, resulting in a loss of traffic over the interfaces that are supported by the network processor. Multiple resets of the network processor would cause the line card to reset, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2024-03-13
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

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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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