CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-20165 — Cisco Broadworks Network Server security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

A vulnerability in the SIP processing subsystem of Cisco BroadWorks could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to halt the processing of incoming SIP requests, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper memory handling for certain SIP requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high number of SIP requests to an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the memory that was allocated to the Cisco BroadWorks Network Servers that handle SIP traffic. If no memory is available, the Network Servers can no longer process incoming requests, resulting in a DoS condition that requires manual intervention to recover.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-01-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-789

Affected products

  • cisco / broadworks_network_server

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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