CVE-2025-20252

A vulnerability in the Internet Key Exchange Version 2 (IKEv2) module of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a memory leak, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper parsing of IKEv2 packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a continuous stream of crafted IKEv2 packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to partially exhaust system memory, causing system instability like being unable to establish new IKEv2 VPN sessions. A manual reboot of the device is required to recover from this condition.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-asa-ftd-ios-dos-DOESHWHy