CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-20004 — A vulnerability in the TLS library of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to exhaust the available...

High CVSS 7.4

A vulnerability in the TLS library of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to exhaust the available memory of an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper management of memory resources during TLS connection setup. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by repeatedly triggering the conditions that cause the memory increase. This could be done in a variety of ways, such as by repeatedly attempting Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) authentication when local EAP is enabled on an affected device or by using a machine-in-the-middle attack and resetting TLS connections between the affected device and other devices. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the available memory on an affected device, resulting in an unexpected reload and a denial of service (DoS) condition.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-771

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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