CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-20141 — Cisco Ios Xr security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the handling of specific packets that are punted from a line card to a route processor in Cisco IOS XR Software Release 7.9.2 could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause control plane traffic to stop working on multiple Cisco IOS XR platforms.  This vulnerability is due to incorrect handling of packets that are punted to the route processor. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending traffic, which must be handled by the Linux stack on the route processor, to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause control plane traffic to stop working, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2025-03-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr / 7.9.2

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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