CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-20244 — A vulnerability in the Remote Access SSL VPN service for Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco...

High CVSS 7.7

A vulnerability in the Remote Access SSL VPN service for Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow a remote attacker that is authenticated as a VPN user to cause the device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to incomplete error checking when parsing an HTTP header field value. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to a targeted Remote Access SSL VPN service on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a DoS condition, which would cause the affected device to reload.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.7 (3.1)
Published
2025-08-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-1287

Affected products

No browser-safe affected-product rows are available.

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.