CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20327 — Cisco Ios Xr security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) termination feature of Cisco IOS XR Software for Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to crash the ppp_ma process, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to the improper handling of malformed PPPoE packets that are received on a router that is running Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) functionality with PPPoE termination on a Lightspeed-based or Lightspeed-Plus-based line card. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted PPPoE packet to an affected line card interface that does not terminate PPPoE. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to crash the ppp_ma process, resulting in a DoS condition for PPPoE traffic across the router.

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

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr

Showing 1 representative product identities from 3 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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