Cisco Patches ISE Security Vulnerability After Public PoC Exploit Release
Jan 08, 2026
Network Security / Vulnerability
Cisco has released updates to address a medium-severity security flaw in Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) with a public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20029 (CVSS score: 4.9), resides in the licensing feature and could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with administrative privileges to gain access to sensitive information. "This vulnerability is due to improper parsing of XML that is processed by the web-based management interface of Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC," Cisco said in a Wednesday advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by uploading a malicious file to the application." Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow an attacker with valid administrative credentials to read arbitrary files from the underlying operating system, which the company said should be off-limits even to administrators. Bobby Gould of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative h...