Description

As part of Cisco's ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard engineering team has conducted a comprehensive internal security review. This review resulted in a software hardening release that addresses multiple internally discovered vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities tracked by CVE-2026-20325 are related to improper neutralization of special elements used in a command issue that are grouped under the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) CWE-77.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "9.9",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-16T20:17:23.347Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-16T20:17:23.347Z",
  "executiveSummary": "Cisco Nexus Dashboard contains a vulnerability identified as CVE-2026-20325, classified under CWE-77: Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command (Command Injection).\nThis vulnerability exists due to inadequate sanitization of user-supplied input before it is processed by a system command execution function within the application.\nAn authenticated, remote attacker could exploit this flaw to execute arbitrary system commands with the privileges of the underlying application service.\nSuccessful exploitation allows an attacker to compromise the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of the affected Nexus Dashboard instance.\nThis issue was discovered internally as part of a software hardening initiative. There are no specific public exploit details currently available, but the impact of command injection is critical, potentially leading to full system compromise if not addressed.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability CVE-2026-20325 is rooted in the failure of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard application to properly neutralize special characters or metacharacters when constructing shell commands.\nCWE-77 (Command Injection) occurs when an application passes unsafe user input—such as form parameters, HTTP headers, or API request fields—to a system shell (e.g., /bin/sh, /bin/bash, or cmd.exe) without sufficient validation or escaping.\nThe attack flow begins when an attacker identifies a vulnerable interface within the Nexus Dashboard that interacts with the underlying operating system. By injecting shell metacharacters such as semicolons (;), pipes (|), ampersands (&), or backticks (`) into the input vector, the attacker can break out of the intended command string and append arbitrary commands.\nBecause these commands are executed by the application process, they inherit the security context and privileges of that process. Depending on the architecture, this may grant the attacker the ability to modify system configurations, exfiltrate sensitive data, or install persistent backdoors.\nThe exploitation process typically follows these steps: First, the attacker maps the application's input vectors that communicate with the backend system. Second, the attacker tests for the presence of command injection by inserting common payload separators (e.g., 'id' or 'whoami' commands appended to existing inputs). Third, if the shell executes the injected command, the attacker crafts a more sophisticated payload to escalate privileges or establish remote persistence.\nThe technical risk is exacerbated by the lack of robust input validation and the potential use of dangerous function calls that trigger shell execution rather than utilizing safer, parameterized APIs.\nWhile the specific vulnerable function names and affected version numbers are maintained within the internal Cisco hardening release documentation, the nature of the flaw requires that the application be updated to a hardened release version that implements strict allow-listing of input characters and enforces the use of secure APIs that do not invoke the system shell."
}