CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-20050 — Cisco Firepower Threat Defense Software security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.8

A vulnerability in the Do Not Decrypt exclusion feature of the SSL decryption feature of Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper memory management during the inspection of TLS 1.2 encrypted traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted TLS 1.2 encrypted traffic through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a reload of an affected device. Note: This vulnerability only affects traffic that is encrypted by TLS 1.2. Other versions of TLS are not affected.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.8 (3.1)
Published
2026-03-04
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-404

Affected products

  • cisco / firepower_threat_defense_software

Showing 1 representative product identities from 4 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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