Description

A vulnerability in the Wireless Network Control daemon (wncd) of Cisco IOS XE Software for Wireless LAN Controllers (WLCs) could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent wireless attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition.

This vulnerability is due to improper memory management. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of IPv6 network requests from an associated wireless IPv6 client to an affected device. To associate a client to a device, an attacker may first need to authenticate to the network, or associate freely in the case of a configured open network. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the wncd process to consume available memory and eventually cause the device to stop responding, resulting in a DoS condition.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-20140

CVSS Base Severity: HIGH

CVSS Base Score: 7.4

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected Products

Vendor: Cisco

Product: Cisco IOS XE Software

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.02% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 2.8% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-06-04 (when was this score calculated)

Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC)

SSVC Exploitation: none

SSVC Technical Impact: partial

SSVC Automatable: false

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-20140
https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-wlc-wncd-p6Gvt6HL

Timeline