Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:HCVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.
Summary
CVE-2024-20351 is a high-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense. Its CVSS base score is 8.6 (High).
Operationally, ranked in the top 47% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SC-5 (Denial-of-service Protection) and SC-6 (Resource Availability) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-18066
Vulnerability Data
A vulnerability in the TCP/IP traffic handling function of the Snort Detection Engine of Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software and Cisco FirePOWER Services could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause legitimate network traffic to be dropped, resulting in…
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a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to the improper handling of TCP/IP network traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large amount of TCP/IP network traffic through the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the Cisco FTD device to drop network traffic, resulting in a DoS condition. The affected device must be rebooted to resolve the DoS condition.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
SC-5 directly limits the effects of resource-exhaustion events that constitute uncontrolled consumption.
SC-6 enforces explicit allocation limits on resources, structurally preventing the weakness from occurring.
Process isolation confines resource consumption to separate domains, reducing blast radius without stopping the root flaw.
Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Pre-agreed severity-based prioritization and resource allocation during incident triage reduce the likelihood that an attacker-induced resource exhaustion will overwhelm the organization before corrective action is taken.
Early notification of anomalous resource consumption or system malfunctions enables throttling or isolation before availability is lost.
Specifying log storage limits and rotation procedures reduces the risk that unbounded log growth will exhaust disk or memory resources and cause denial of service.
Resource-utilization monitoring and alerting on bottlenecks or overloads limits the impact of denial-of-service or resource-exhaustion attacks.
A.8.20 implements network-level protections (firewalls, segmentation, protocol hardening, monitoring, authentication of systems/devices) that can limit abuse of a resource-consuming weakness but do not stop the weakness from being exploitable; the flaw remains present in the product and can still be triggered from an authorized or internal context.
Monitoring network service usage and applying controls to restrict access when necessary limits an attacker’s ability to consume excessive resources through unrestricted or unauthenticated service calls.
Hardening callouts derived
DISA STIG baselines are authored against specific weaknesses. Where this CVE cites a broad weakness class, the mapping is not asserted at that abstraction (owner ruling, 2026-09-25: grade only at Base and below), so no rule is shown here rather than a rule shown against the wrong grain.
- No fine-grained STIG row for CWE-400, a class-level weakness. Rules are authored against its narrower children: CWE-770.