CVE-2025-20337 — Identity Services Engine
CRITICALCVE-2025-20337 is a critical-severity (CVSS 10) CWE-74 vulnerability in cisco identity services engine. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-07-28) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
A vulnerability in a specific API of Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system as root.…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-07-28. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-08-18.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2025-20337.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2025-20337 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A vulnerability in a specific API of Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system as root. The attacker does not require any valid credentials to exploit this vulnerability.
This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted API request. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to obtain root privileges on an affected device.
Affected Products
identity services engineciscoidentity services engine passive identity connectorciscoDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every cisco identity services engine deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2025-20337 yet — track the cisco identity services engine advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-20337 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.