Raw vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:NSummary
CVE-2025-20187 is a medium-severity Path Traversal (CWE-22) vulnerability in Cisco Catalyst Sd-Wan Manager. Its CVSS base score is 6.5 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190); ranked in the top 34% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-3 (Access Enforcement) and SI-10 (Information Input Validation) — see the control section below for these in your framework.
OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-13917
Vulnerability Data
A vulnerability in the application data endpoints of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly Cisco SD-WAN vManage, could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to write arbitrary files to an affected system. This vulnerability is due to improper validation of requests to…
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APIs. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malicious requests to an API within the affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to conduct directory traversal attacks and write files to an arbitrary location on the affected system.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Control response
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V5.3.2
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Enforces the intended directory access authorizations that path traversal would otherwise bypass.
Input validation directly neutralizes special path elements before pathname construction occurs.
Least privilege reduces the impact of any unauthorized file access obtained via traversal.
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.
Patching/maintenance can remediate known path-traversal flaws in deployed software (partial prevention of exploitability) but does nothing to stop the coding defect from being introduced in the first place.
PR.AA-05 defines and reviews access policies but does not address code-level pathname neutralization, so neither direction prevents CWE-22.
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 catches path traversal via static/dynamic analysis.
Secure SDLC mandates input validation and path sanitization that directly prevent path traversal.
Application security requirements include rules for safe file handling and canonicalization.
Secure architecture principles require least-privilege file access and directory isolation.
Secure coding standards explicitly forbid unsafe path construction and mandate safe APIs.
Information access restriction limits which files an application may read or write.