What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-15397: Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance IPsec VPN Denial of Service Vulnerability

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-10-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-320

Description

A vulnerability in the implementation of Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) over IPsec functionality in Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to restart unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to an error that may occur if the affected software renegotiates the encryption key for an IPsec tunnel when certain TFC traffic is in flight. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious stream of TFC traffic through an established IPsec tunnel on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a daemon process on the affected device to crash, which could cause the device to crash and result in a DoS condition.

Affected products

• Cisco ASA Software: 9.6.4, 9.8.2, 9.9.1, 9.9.1(1)
• Cisco Firepower Management Center: 6.2.2

References

• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041786
• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20181003-asa-ipsec-dos
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1041786
• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20181003-asa-ipsec-dos

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