CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-20119 — Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6

A vulnerability in the system file permission handling of Cisco APIC could allow an authenticated, local attacker to overwrite critical system files, which could cause a DoS condition. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid administrative credentials. This vulnerability is due to a race condition with handling system files. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by doing specific operations on the file system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to overwrite system files, which could lead to the device being in an inconsistent state and cause a DoS condition.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6 (3.1)
Published
2025-02-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • cisco / application_policy_infrastructure_controller / 3.2(1l)
  • cisco / application_policy_infrastructure_controller / 3.2(1m)
  • cisco / application_policy_infrastructure_controller / 3.2(2l)
  • cisco / application_policy_infrastructure_controller / 3.2(2o)
  • cisco / application_policy_infrastructure_controller / 3.2(3i)
  • cisco / application_policy_infrastructure_controller / 3.2(3j)

Showing 6 representative product identities from 128 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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