CVE-2026-20181 — Identity Services Engine
CRITICALCVE-2026-20181 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.1) Path Traversal vulnerability in cisco identity services engine. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
A vulnerability in Cisco ISE and ISE-PIC could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of an affected device. To exploit…
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-20181.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-20181 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 385,386 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A vulnerability in Cisco ISE and ISE-PIC could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of an affected device. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid administrative credentials.
This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to obtain user-level access to the underlying operating system and then elevate privileges to root. In single-node deployments, successful exploitation of this vulnerability could cause the affected ISE node to become unavailable, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. In that condition, endpoints that have not already authenticated would be unable to access the network until the node is restored.
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.
Fix
Apply the cisco identity services engine security patch or hotfix for CVE-2026-20181 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Resolve every user-supplied path to its canonical form and reject anything that escapes the intended directory, and run the component under an account that has no read or write access outside the directory it legitimately serves. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-20181 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.