CVE-2026-20050 Vulnerability Analysis & Exploit Details

CVE-2026-20050 Vulnerability Summary

CVE-2026-20050: A vulnerability in the Do Not Decrypt exclusion feature of the SSL decryption feature of Cisco Secure Firewall 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 memory management during the inspection of TLS 1.2 encrypted traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted TLS 1.2 encrypted traffic through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a reload of an affected device. Note: This vulnerability only affects traffic that is encrypted by TLS 1.2. Other versions of TLS are not affected.

CVE-2026-20050 References

External References

• https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-ftd-dnd-dos-bpEcg7B7

CWE Common Weakness Enumeration

CAPEC Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification

• Flooding CAPEC-125 An adversary consumes the resources of a target by rapidly engaging in a large number of interactions with the target. This type of attack generally exposes a weakness in rate limiting or flow. When successful this attack prevents legitimate users from accessing the service and can cause the target to crash. This attack differs from resource depletion through leaks or allocations in that the latter attacks do not rely on the volume of requests made to the target but instead focus on manipulation of the target's operations. The key factor in a flooding attack is the number of requests the adversary can make in a given period of time. The greater this number, the more likely an attack is to succeed against a given target.
• Excessive Allocation CAPEC-130 An adversary causes the target to allocate excessive resources to servicing the attackers' request, thereby reducing the resources available for legitimate services and degrading or denying services. Usually, this attack focuses on memory allocation, but any finite resource on the target could be the attacked, including bandwidth, processing cycles, or other resources. This attack does not attempt to force this allocation through a large number of requests (that would be Resource Depletion through Flooding) but instead uses one or a small number of requests that are carefully formatted to force the target to allocate excessive resources to service this request(s). Often this attack takes advantage of a bug in the target to cause the target to allocate resources vastly beyond what would be needed for a normal request.
• Resource Leak Exposure CAPEC-131 An adversary utilizes a resource leak on the target to deplete the quantity of the resource available to service legitimate requests.
• TCP Fragmentation CAPEC-494 An adversary may execute a TCP Fragmentation attack against a target with the intention of avoiding filtering rules of network controls, by attempting to fragment the TCP packet such that the headers flag field is pushed into the second fragment which typically is not filtered.
• UDP Fragmentation CAPEC-495 An attacker may execute a UDP Fragmentation attack against a target server in an attempt to consume resources such as bandwidth and CPU. IP fragmentation occurs when an IP datagram is larger than the MTU of the route the datagram has to traverse. Typically the attacker will use large UDP packets over 1500 bytes of data which forces fragmentation as ethernet MTU is 1500 bytes. This attack is a variation on a typical UDP flood but it enables more network bandwidth to be consumed with fewer packets. Additionally it has the potential to consume server CPU resources and fill memory buffers associated with the processing and reassembling of fragmented packets.
• ICMP Fragmentation CAPEC-496 An attacker may execute a ICMP Fragmentation attack against a target with the intention of consuming resources or causing a crash. The attacker crafts a large number of identical fragmented IP packets containing a portion of a fragmented ICMP message. The attacker these sends these messages to a target host which causes the host to become non-responsive. Another vector may be sending a fragmented ICMP message to a target host with incorrect sizes in the header which causes the host to hang.
• BlueSmacking CAPEC-666 An adversary uses Bluetooth flooding to transfer large packets to Bluetooth enabled devices over the L2CAP protocol with the goal of creating a DoS. This attack must be carried out within close proximity to a Bluetooth enabled device.

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