CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-20171 — A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enforce-first-as feature of Cisco Nexus 3000 Series Switches and Cisco...

Medium CVSS 6.8

A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enforce-first-as feature of Cisco Nexus 3000 Series Switches and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches in standalone NX-OS mode could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger BGP peer flaps, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to incorrect parsing of a transitive BGP attribute. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted BGP update through an established BGP peer session. If the update propagates to an affected device, it could cause the device to drop the BGP session and flap with the BGP peer that is forwarding this update, resulting in a DoS condition.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.8 (3.1)
Published
2026-05-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-670

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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