Description

A vulnerability in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of Cisco Secure Client for Windows could allow an authenticated, local attacker to perform a DLL hijacking attack on an affected device if the Secure Firewall Posture Engine, formerly HostScan, is installed on Cisco Secure Client.

This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of resources that are loaded by the application at run time. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPC message to a specific Cisco Secure Client process. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the affected machine with SYSTEM privileges. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid user credentials on the Windows system.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-20206

CVSS Base Severity: HIGH

CVSS Base Score: 7.1

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

Affected Products

Vendor: Cisco

Product: Cisco Secure Client

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.01% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 0.32% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-04-02 (when was this score calculated)

Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC)

SSVC Exploitation: none

SSVC Technical Impact: total

SSVC Automatable: false

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-20206
https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-secure-dll-injection-AOyzEqSg

Timeline