CVE-2022-20854 Denial of service in Cisco Firepower Management Center
Unauthenticated remote attackers can cause a denial of service by sending high rates of crafted SSH connections, leading to resource exhaustion and device reboots.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2022-20854?
CVE-2022-20854 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, published on 10 Nov 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
A vulnerability in the processing of SSH connections of Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC) and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper error handling when an SSH session fails to be established. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high rate of crafted SSH connections to the instance. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause resource exhaustion, resulting in a reboot on the affected device.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-20854?
It affects 2 products.
Products include Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense.
How do I fix CVE-2022-20854?
No fix has been published for CVE-2022-20854 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2022-20854 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-20854 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center
- CVE-2026-20079 Cisco Firewall Management Center Authentication Bypass Using an Alternate Path or Channel
- CVE-2026-20131 Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software and Cisco Security Cloud Control (SCC) Firewall Management Deserialization of Untrusted Data
- CVE-2026-20316 Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Use of Hard-coded Password
- CVE-2025-20265 Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Software Radius Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
- CVE-2024-20424 Command injection in Cisco Firepower Management Center
Sources
Also known as GHSA-mm7h-p3v8-j9f3.