CVE-2025-20286

A vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud deployments of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data, execute limited administrative operations, modify system configurations, or disrupt services within the impacted systems.

This vulnerability exists because credentials are improperly generated when Cisco ISE is being deployed on cloud platforms, resulting in different Cisco ISE deployments sharing the same credentials. These credentials are shared across multiple Cisco ISE deployments as long as the software release and cloud platform are the same. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by extracting the user credentials from Cisco ISE that is deployed in the cloud and then using them to access Cisco ISE that is deployed in other cloud environments through unsecured ports. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to access sensitive data, execute limited administrative operations, modify system configurations, or disrupt services within the impacted systems. Note: If the Primary Administration node is deployed in the cloud, then Cisco ISE is affected by this vulnerability. If the Primary Administration node is on-premises, then it is not affected.

Weakness

The product contains a hard-coded password, which it uses for its own inbound authentication or for outbound communication to external components.

Extended Description

There are two main variations of a hard-coded password:

Potential Mitigations

• For inbound authentication: apply strong one-way hashes to your passwords and store those hashes in a configuration file or database with appropriate access control. That way, theft of the file/database still requires the attacker to try to crack the password. When receiving an incoming password during authentication, take the hash of the password and compare it to the hash that you have saved.
• Use randomly assigned salts for each separate hash that you generate. This increases the amount of computation that an attacker needs to conduct a brute-force attack, possibly limiting the effectiveness of the rainbow table method.
• For front-end to back-end connections: Three solutions are possible, although none are complete.

References

• https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-ise-aws-static-cred-FPMjUcm7