Cisco Secure FMC RADIUS Auth Shell Injection
CVE-2025-20265 Published on August 14, 2025
Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Software Radius Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
A vulnerability in the RADIUS subsystem implementation of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to inject arbitrary shell commands that are executed by the device.
This vulnerability is due to a lack of proper handling of user input during the authentication phase. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted input when entering credentials that will be authenticated at the configured RADIUS server. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute commands at a high privilege level.
Note: For this vulnerability to be exploited, Cisco Secure FMC Software must be configured for RADIUS authentication for the web-based management interface, SSH management, or both.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2025-20265 can be exploited with network access, and does not require authorization privileges or user interaction. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be critical as this vulnerability has a high impact to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of this component.
Weakness Type
What is an Injection Vulnerability?
The software constructs all or part of a command, data structure, or record using externally-influenced input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could modify how it is parsed or interpreted when it is sent to a downstream component. Software has certain assumptions about what constitutes data and control respectively. It is the lack of verification of these assumptions for user-controlled input that leads to injection problems. Injection problems encompass a wide variety of issues -- all mitigated in very different ways and usually attempted in order to alter the control flow of the process. For this reason, the most effective way to discuss these weaknesses is to note the distinct features which classify them as injection weaknesses. The most important issue to note is that all injection problems share one thing in common -- i.e., they allow for the injection of control plane data into the user-controlled data plane. This means that the execution of the process may be altered by sending code in through legitimate data channels, using no other mechanism. While buffer overflows, and many other flaws, involve the use of some further issue to gain execution, injection problems need only for the data to be parsed. The most classic instantiations of this category of weakness are SQL injection and format string vulnerabilities.
CVE-2025-20265 has been classified to as an Injection vulnerability or weakness.
Products Associated with CVE-2025-20265
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Affected Versions
Cisco Firepower Management Center:- Version 7.0.7 is affected.
- Version 7.7.0 is affected.
Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.