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Fencer Intel
medium 5.3

CVE-2020-3548 json

Cisco Email Security Appliance Denial Of Service Vulnerability

published last yr. modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2020-24819

cvss
5.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 58%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A vulnerability in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol implementation of Cisco AsyncOS software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause high CPU usage on an affected device, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to inefficient processing of incoming TLS traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of crafted TLS packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a prolonged state of high CPU utilization. The affected device would still be operative, but response time and overall performance may be degraded.There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

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CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
last yr.

Exploit prediction

0.84% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 58% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L/RL:X/RC:X/E:X
CNA 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Cisco Cisco Secure Email
  • cisco secure_email

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.