CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-20158

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Feb 19, 2025 | Modified: Feb 19, 2025
CVSS 3.x
N/A
Source:
NVD
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

A vulnerability in the debug shell of Cisco Video Phone 8875 and Cisco Desk Phone 9800 Series could allow an authenticated, local attacker to access sensitive information on an affected device. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid administrative credentials with SSH access on the affected device. SSH access is disabled by default.

This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input by the debug shell of an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted SSH client command to the CLI. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to access sensitive information on the underlying operating system.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References