title: Cisco Email Security Appliance and Cisco Content Security Management Appliance Denial of Service Vulnerability
description: A vulnerability in the email message filtering feature of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) and Cisco Content Security Management Appliance (SMA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause repeated crashes in some internal processes that are running on the affected devices, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of email attachments. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending an email message with a crafted attachment through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause specific processes to crash repeatedly, resulting in the complete unavailability of both the Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and message tracking features and in severe performance degradation while processing email. After the affected processes restart, the software resumes filtering for the same attachment, causing the affected processes to crash and restart again. A successful exploit could also allow the attacker to cause a repeated DoS condition. Manual intervention may be required to recover from this situation.
problem types: CWE-20
affected:
{
product: Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA)
vendor: Cisco
versions:
status: affected, version: n/a
}
metrics:
cvssV3_0: [
attackComplexity: LOW
attackVector: NETWORK
availabilityImpact: HIGH
baseScore: 7.5
baseSeverity: HIGH
confidentialityImpact: NONE
integrityImpact: NONE
privilegesRequired: NONE
scope: UNCHANGED
userInteraction: NONE
vectorString: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
version: 3.0
]
exploits: The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory.