Cisco Secure Email Remote Access unnecessary privileges

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability identified as problematic has been detected in Cisco Secure Email, Secure Email and Web Manager and Secure Web Appliance. This vulnerability affects unknown code of the component Remote Access. The manipulation leads to unnecessary privileges. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2025-20185. The attack is possible to be carried out remotely. No exploit exists. You should upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Cisco Secure Email, Secure Email and Web Manager and Secure Web Appliance (affected version not known) and classified as problematic. This issue affects some unknown functionality of the component Remote Access. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a unnecessary privileges vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-250. The product performs an operation at a privilege level that is higher than the minimum level required, which creates new weaknesses or amplifies the consequences of other weaknesses. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

A vulnerability in the implementation of the remote access functionality of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, Cisco Secure Email Gateway, and Cisco Secure Web Appliance could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate privileges to root. The attacker must authenticate with valid administrator credentials. This vulnerability is due to an architectural flaw in the password generation algorithm for the remote access functionality. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by generating a temporary password for the service account. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root and access the underlying operating system. Note: The Security Impact Rating (SIR) for this vulnerability is Medium due to the unrestricted scope of information that is accessible to an attacker.

The advisory is shared at sec.cloudapps.cisco.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2025-20185 since 10/10/2024. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be initiated remotely. Additional levels of successful authentication are required for exploitation. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/06/2025). MITRE ATT&CK project uses the attack technique T1068 for this issue.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 215118 (Cisco Secure Email Gateway Privelege Escalation (cisco-sa-esa-sma-wsa-multi-yKUJhS34)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading eliminates this vulnerability.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at Tenable (215118). Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Vendor

• Cisco

Name

• Secure Email
• Secure Email and Web Manager
• Secure Web Appliance

License

• commercial

Website

• Vendor: https://www.cisco.com/

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Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

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