CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-20136 — A vulnerability in the function that performs IPv4 and IPv6 Network Address Translation (NAT) DNS inspection for Cisco Secure Firewall...

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the function that performs IPv4 and IPv6 Network Address Translation (NAT) DNS inspection for Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.  This vulnerability is due to an infinite loop condition that occurs when a Cisco Secure ASA or Cisco Secure FTD device processes DNS packets with DNS inspection enabled and the device is configured for NAT44, NAT64, or NAT46. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted DNS packets that match a static NAT rule with DNS inspection enabled through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to create an infinite loop and cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2025-08-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-835

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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