CVE-2026-20181 / CVE-2026-20190 — Cisco Identity Services Engine: unauthenticated credential read chaining to authenticated root command execution
From CTI Daily Brief — 2026-06-19 · published 2026-06-19 · view item permalink →
Cisco's advisory cisco-sa-ise-multi-G5WP8vv (2026-06-17) covers two flaws in ISE and ISE Passive Identity Connector (Cisco PSIRT, 2026-06-17; SecurityWeek, 2026-06-18). CVE-2026-20190 (improper authorization, CVSS 7.5) lets an unauthenticated remote attacker read sensitive data — including hashed administrator credentials — via crafted HTTP requests to specific APIs. CVE-2026-20181 (path traversal, CWE-22, CVSS 9.1) lets an authenticated administrator execute arbitrary OS commands and escalate to root; on single-node deployments it also causes a DoS. Cisco states there is no workaround and reports no known exploitation. Fixed in ISE 3.3 Patch 11 and 3.4 Patch 6 (available now); ISE 3.5 Patch 4 is scheduled for August 2026, with 3.5 Patch 3 closing only CVE-2026-20190 in the interim. The combined two-stage chain — and the detection/hardening for the identity plane it controls — is this brief's § 5 deep dive.