CVE-2026-20173

medium

Assigned by CNA: cisco

Published 2026-10-07 · Modified 2026-10-07

Discuss on Community Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

5.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:L

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.8

Description

A vulnerability in Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust system resources, causing a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability exists because rate limiting was improperly applied to some protocols. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high rate of UDP or TCP connections to a data plane interface on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause instability to various routing and control plane protocols through some packet loss and temporary disruptions, causing a DoS condition. This DoS condition will clear without manual intervention soon after the high rate of traffic is stopped.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

68%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-nxos-nscpdos-SnderkC7

CWEs

CWE-770

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.