CVE-2025-20206
Published: 05 March 2025
Description
Adversaries may abuse dynamic-link library files (DLLs) in order to achieve persistence, escalate privileges, and evade defenses.
Security Summary
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)
Affected Products
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques
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).