CVE-2025-20206
Published: 05 March 2025
Summary
CVE-2025-20206 is a high-severity Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature (CWE-347) vulnerability in Cisco Secure Client. Its CVSS base score is 7.1 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068); ranked at the 7.3th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 CM-14 (Signed Components) and SI-7 (Software, Firmware, and Information Integrity).
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI
Requires integrity-checking mechanisms for software loaded at runtime, directly preventing DLL hijacking by detecting unauthorized or tampered DLLs in Cisco Secure Client.
Mandates digital signatures for system components like DLLs, ensuring only verified components are loaded despite IPC-triggered hijacking attempts.
Validates inputs such as crafted IPC messages to the Cisco Secure Client process, blocking exploitation that leads to insufficient resource validation and DLL loading.
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Vulnerability enables DLL hijacking via crafted IPC messages leading to arbitrary code execution with SYSTEM privileges, directly mapping to exploitation for privilege escalation (T1068) and DLL side-loading (T1574.002).
NVD Description
A vulnerability in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of Cisco Secure Client for Windows could allow an authenticated, local attacker to perform a DLL hijacking attack on an affected device if the Secure Firewall Posture Engine, formerly HostScan, is installed…
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on Cisco Secure Client. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of resources that are loaded by the application at run time. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPC message to a specific Cisco Secure Client process. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the affected machine with SYSTEM privileges. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid user credentials on the Windows system.
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2025-20206 is a vulnerability in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of Cisco Secure Client for Windows that enables a DLL hijacking attack. It affects devices where the Secure Firewall Posture Engine, formerly known as HostScan, is installed on Cisco Secure Client. The flaw arises from insufficient validation of resources loaded by the application at runtime.
An authenticated local attacker with valid user credentials on the Windows system can exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPC message to a specific Cisco Secure Client process. Successful exploitation allows the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the affected machine with SYSTEM privileges. The vulnerability has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.1 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N) and is associated with CWE-347.
The Cisco Security Advisory provides details on this issue, including mitigation recommendations, at https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-secure-dll-injection-AOyzEqSg.
Details
- CWE(s)