CVE-2018-15453

HIGH

Cisco Email Security Appliance Firmware - Denial of Service via S/MIME Email Processing

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

A vulnerability in the Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Decryption and Verification or S/MIME Public Key Harvesting features of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to corrupt system memory. A successful exploit could cause the filtering process to unexpectedly reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the device. The vulnerability is due to improper input validation of S/MIME-signed emails. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious S/MIME-signed email through a targeted device. If Decryption and Verification or Public Key Harvesting is configured, the filtering process could crash due to memory corruption and restart, resulting in a DoS condition. The software could then resume processing the same S/MIME-signed email, causing the filtering process to crash and restart again. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a permanent DoS condition. This vulnerability may require manual intervention to recover the ESA.

References (2)

Core 2
Core References
Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry vdb-entry x_refsource_bid
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/106511

Scores

CVSS v3 8.6
EPSS 0.0229
EPSS Percentile 81.1%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

CISA SSVC

Vulnrichment
Exploitation none
Automatable yes
Technical Impact partial

Details

CWE
CWE-20 CWE-787
Status published
Products (2)
cisco/email_security_appliance_firmware 11.0.1-401
cisco/email_security_appliance_firmware 11.1.0-131
Published Jan 10, 2019
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026