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Mallory
Medium

Path Traversal in Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC

IdentifiersCVE-2026-20148CWE-22· Improper Limitation of a Pathname…

CVE-2026-20148 is an authenticated remote path traversal vulnerability in Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC). The flaw is caused by improper validation of user-supplied input in an HTTP-accessible component, allowing a remote attacker with valid administrative credentials to send a crafted HTTP request that traverses directories on the underlying operating system. Successful exploitation allows the attacker to read arbitrary files, including sensitive files accessible to the affected application or system context.

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For your environment

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ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.

Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

Successful exploitation allows an authenticated attacker to access and read sensitive arbitrary files from the underlying operating system. This can expose configuration data, credentials, certificates, keys, logs, and other sensitive information stored on the appliance, depending on file permissions and runtime context. The issue is an information disclosure vulnerability rather than direct code execution.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

No workaround is available according to Cisco. Risk reduction is therefore limited to restricting and monitoring administrative access to the management interface, minimizing exposure of the interface to untrusted networks, enforcing strong credential hygiene and MFA where available, and upgrading to a fixed release as the primary mitigation.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Upgrade Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC to a fixed release provided by Cisco. The supporting content states Cisco released fixes in 3.1 Patch 11, 3.2 Patch 10, 3.3 Patch 11, 3.4 Patch 6, and 3.5 Patch 3. Releases earlier than 3.1 should be migrated to a supported fixed release because no direct patch is provided for those versions. For Cisco ISE-PIC, release 3.4 Patch 6 is the terminal fix because 3.4 is the last supported version.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.

VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

Affected products & vendors

Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.

VendorProductType
Cisco SystemsIdentity Services Engineapplication
Cisco SystemsIdentity Services Engine Passive Identity Connectorapplication
Cisco SystemsIdentity Services Engine Picapplication

Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.

What this page doesn’t show

The version that knows your environment.

This page is what’s public. Mallory adds the parts that aren’t: which of your assets are affected, which adversaries are exploiting it right now, which detections to deploy, and what to do tonight.
Exposure mapping

Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.

Threat actor evidence

Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.

Associated malware

Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.

Detection signatures

YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.

Vendor-by-vendor mapping

Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.

Social activity3

Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.