CVE-2025-20309

A vulnerability in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log in to an affected device using the root account, which has default, static credentials that cannot be changed or deleted.

This vulnerability is due to the presence of static user credentials for the root account that are reserved for use during development. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the account to log in to an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to log in to the affected system and execute arbitrary commands as the root user.

Weakness

The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.

Affected Software

Extended Description

There are two main variations:

Potential Mitigations

• For outbound authentication: store passwords, keys, and other credentials outside of the code in a strongly-protected, encrypted configuration file or database that is protected from access by all outsiders, including other local users on the same system. Properly protect the key (CWE-320). If you cannot use encryption to protect the file, then make sure that the permissions are as restrictive as possible [REF-7].
• In Windows environments, the Encrypted File System (EFS) may provide some protection.
• For inbound authentication using passwords: apply strong one-way hashes to 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 handling an incoming password during authentication, take the hash of the password and compare it to the saved hash.
• Use randomly assigned salts for each separate hash that is generated. 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.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/191.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/70.html

References

• https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-cucm-ssh-m4UBdpE7