CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-20508 — Cisco Unified Threat Defense Snort Intrusion Prevention System Engine security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

A vulnerability in Cisco Unified Threat Defense (UTD) Snort Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) Engine for Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass configured security policies or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of HTTP requests when they are processed by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a reload of the Snort process. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to the default, fail-open, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow the attacker to bypass configured security policies. If the action in case of Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine failure is set to fail-close, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could cause traffic that is configured to be inspected by Cisco UTD Snort IPS Engine to be dropped.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-09-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-122, CWE-787

Affected products

  • cisco / unified_threat_defense_snort_intrusion_prevention_system_engine / 17.6.1a
  • cisco / unified_threat_defense_snort_intrusion_prevention_system_engine / 17.6.2
  • cisco / unified_threat_defense_snort_intrusion_prevention_system_engine / 17.6.6
  • cisco / unified_threat_defense_snort_intrusion_prevention_system_engine / 17.7.1a
  • cisco / unified_threat_defense_snort_intrusion_prevention_system_engine / 17.7.2
  • cisco / unified_threat_defense_snort_intrusion_prevention_system_engine / 17.8.1a

Showing 6 representative product identities from 16 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Buffer bounds, memory safety, and memory corruption

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify affected native-code versions, build flags, architectures, parsers, codecs, drivers, and input paths in all shipped artifacts.
  • Determine whether untrusted data reaches the affected routine and the process privilege, sandbox, and network exposure.
  • Confirm statically linked, vendored, firmware, and platform-provided copies, not only package-manager records.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the maintained upstream correction or replace the affected component, then rebuild every dependent artifact from clean inputs.
  • Adopt bounds-checked interfaces, validated sizes and integer conversions, clear ownership, and memory-safe components where practical.
  • Enable supported compiler and runtime hardening and add sanitized tests and fuzz regression seeds derived from non-weaponized fixtures.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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