CVE-2025-20185

Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, Secure Email Gateway, and Secure Web Appliance Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

At a glance

Severity
LOW 3.4
EPSS
EPSS 0.19 % · percentile 8 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
cisco
NVD status
Analyzed

Description

A vulnerability in the implementation of the remote access functionality of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, Cisco Secure Email Gateway, and Cisco Secure Web Appliance could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate privileges to root. The attacker must authenticate with valid administrator credentials. This vulnerability is due to an architectural flaw in the password generation algorithm for the remote access functionality. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by generating a temporary password for the service account. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root and access the underlying operating system. Note: The Security Impact Rating (SIR) for this vulnerability is Medium due to the unrestricted scope of information that is accessible to an attacker.

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1LOW 3.4CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:Ncisco
CVSS 3.1LOW 3.4CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:NNVD · psirt@cisco.com (Secondary)
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 6.7CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)

Weaknesses (CWE)

European references

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
Cisco · Cisco Secure Emailaffected 14.0.0-698 ; affected 13.5.1-277 ; affected 13.0.0-392 ; affected 14.2.0-620 ; affected 13.0.5-007 ; affected 13.5.4-038
Cisco · Cisco Secure Email and Web Manageraffected 13.6.2-023 ; affected 13.6.2-078 ; affected 13.0.0-249 ; affected 13.0.0-277 ; affected 13.8.1-052 ; affected 13.8.1-068
Cisco · Cisco Secure Web Applianceaffected 11.8.0-453 ; affected 12.5.3-002 ; affected 12.0.3-007 ; affected 12.0.3-005 ; affected 14.1.0-032 ; affected 14.1.0-047

References

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD