Cisco IOS XR protection mech. failure (CWE-693)
CVE-2026-20277 Published on September 2, 2026

Cisco IOS XR Software Security Hardening Release: September 2026
As part of Cisco's ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco IOS XR Software engineering team has conducted a comprehensive internal security review. This review resulted in a software hardening releases that address multiple internally discovered vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities tracked by CVE-2026-20277 are related to protection mechanism failure issues that are grouped under the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) CWE-693.

NVD

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2026-20277 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 have no impact on confidentiality, with no impact on integrity, and a high impact on availability.

Attack Vector:
NETWORK
Attack Complexity:
LOW
Privileges Required:
NONE
User Interaction:
NONE
Scope:
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact:
NONE
Integrity Impact:
LOW
Availability Impact:
HIGH

Weakness Type

Protection Mechanism Failure

The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the product. This weakness covers three distinct situations. A "missing" protection mechanism occurs when the application does not define any mechanism against a certain class of attack. An "insufficient" protection mechanism might provide some defenses - for example, against the most common attacks - but it does not protect against everything that is intended. Finally, an "ignored" mechanism occurs when a mechanism is available and in active use within the product, but the developer has not applied it in some code path.


Products Associated with CVE-2026-20277

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Affected Versions

Cisco IOS XR Software: