CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-20162 — Cisco Ios Xe security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the DHCP snooping security feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a full interface queue wedge, which could result in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of DHCP request packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending DHCP request packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause packets to wedge in the queue, creating a DoS condition for downstream devices of the affected system and requiring that the system restart to drain the queue. Note: This vulnerability can be exploited with either unicast or broadcast DHCP packets on a VLAN that does not have DHCP snooping enabled.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2025-05-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.11.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.11.1a
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.11.1s
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.11.2
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.12.1
  • cisco / ios_xe / 16.12.1a

Showing 6 representative product identities from 93 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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