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Fencer Vulns
high 8.6

CVE-2018-15453 json

Cisco Email Security Appliance Memory Corruption Denial of Service Vulnerability

published 2019-01-10 7 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2018-7331

cvss
8.6
version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.3%
EPSS 2.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 83%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
23 mo ago

Exploit prediction

2.29% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 83% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 8.6 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 8.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.8 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Affected products

  • Cisco Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA)

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.