CVE-2025-20125
Published: 05 February 2025
Summary
CVE-2025-20125 is a critical-severity Improper Authorization (CWE-285) vulnerability in Cisco Identity Services Engine. Its CVSS base score is 9.1 (Critical).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068); ranked in the top 15.7% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 AC-3 (Access Enforcement) and SI-10 (Information Input Validation).
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI
Enforces approved authorizations in the Cisco ISE API to prevent read-only credential holders from obtaining sensitive information, changing configurations, or restarting the node.
Validates user-supplied data in crafted HTTP requests to the affected API, mitigating improper input validation that enables exploitation.
Restricts read-only administrative credentials to only necessary view operations, reducing the impact of authorization bypasses allowing configuration changes and node restarts.
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
API authorization bypass enables remote exploitation of public-facing service (T1190) for privilege escalation (T1068), sensitive data access (T1005), and node reboot (T1529).
NVD Description
A vulnerability in an API of Cisco ISE could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with valid read-only credentials to obtain sensitive information, change node configurations, and restart the node. This vulnerability is due to a lack of authorization in a…
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specific API and improper validation of user-supplied data. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to a specific API on the device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to attacker to obtain information, modify system configuration, and reload the device. Note: To successfully exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid read-only administrative credentials. In a single-node deployment, new devices will not be able to authenticate during the reload time.
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2025-20125 is a vulnerability in an API of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with valid read-only credentials to obtain sensitive information, change node configurations, and restart the node. The flaw arises from a lack of authorization in a specific API combined with improper validation of user-supplied data, mapped to CWE-285 and CWE-862. It carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.1 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:H).
An attacker with valid read-only administrative credentials can exploit the vulnerability remotely by sending a crafted HTTP request to the affected API on the ISE device. Successful exploitation allows the attacker to obtain sensitive information, modify system configurations, and reload the device. In single-node deployments, new devices will not be able to authenticate during the reload period.
Mitigation details are available in the Cisco Security Advisory at https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-ise-multivuls-FTW9AOXF.
Details
- CWE(s)