CVE-2025-20140
Cisco Ios Xe 16.10.1 … 17.9.5f
Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:HSummary
CVE-2025-20140 is a high-severity Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value (CWE-789) vulnerability in Cisco Ios Xe. Its CVSS base score is 7.4 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Endpoint Denial of Service (T1499); ranked at the 15th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SI-10 (Information Input Validation) and SC-6 (Resource Availability) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-13886
Vulnerability Data
A vulnerability in the Wireless Network Control daemon (wncd) of Cisco IOS XE Software for Wireless LAN Controllers (WLCs) could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent wireless attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper…
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memory management. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of IPv6 network requests from an associated wireless IPv6 client to an affected device. To associate a client to a device, an attacker may first need to authenticate to the network, or associate freely in the case of a configured open network. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the wncd process to consume available memory and eventually cause the device to stop responding, resulting in a DoS condition.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Input validation directly rejects or bounds untrusted size values before any allocation occurs.
Resource quotas and priority allocation limit the system-wide impact of an oversized request.
Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Secure SDLC practices directly prevent coding flaws that trust unvalidated size values for allocations.
Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI
Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.
Security testing in development can detect and block excessive allocation flaws before deployment.
Secure development lifecycle includes input validation and size checks that prevent unbounded allocations.
Application security requirements mandate bounds checking on size parameters to avoid excessive memory allocation.
Secure architecture principles require resource-limit enforcement that mitigates uncontrolled memory requests.
Secure coding standards directly prohibit allocating memory from untrusted size values without validation.
Capacity management monitors overall resource use but does not prevent individual allocation bugs.