CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20480 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the DHCP Snooping feature of Cisco IOS XE Software on Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) fabric edge nodes could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause high CPU utilization on an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition that requires a manual reload to recover. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of IPv4 DHCP packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending certain IPv4 DHCP packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to exhaust CPU resources and stop processing traffic, resulting in a DoS condition that requires a manual reload to recover.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2024-09-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-783, CWE-670

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.1.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.1.2
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.1.3
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.2.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.2.2
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.3.1

Showing 6 representative product identities from 205 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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