Description

As part of Cisco's ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco Crosswork 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-2026-20357 are related to missing authentication for critical function issues that are grouped under the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) CWE-306.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "10.0",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-19T17:18:40.697Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-19T17:18:40.697Z",
  "executiveSummary": "An internal security review conducted by the Cisco Crosswork engineering team identified multiple vulnerabilities affecting Cisco Crosswork products, tracked collectively under CVE-2026-20357. The underlying security defect is classified under Common Weakness Enumeration CWE-306, which designates missing authentication for critical functions within the affected software architecture. This flaw exposes sensitive administrative and operational routines to unauthorized manipulation without requiring prior authentication or validation of user identity. The lack of proper access controls introduces severe risk implications, potentially allowing unauthenticated threat actors to interact directly with restricted application endpoints. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability enables malicious actors to bypass security perimeters, execute privileged actions, and compromise the operational integrity and confidentiality of the targeted system. Given that the vulnerability stems from software design flaws involving unvalidated functional boundaries, exploitation generally requires network accessibility to the vulnerable endpoints exposed by the application. Organizations utilizing the impacted Cisco Crosswork software face elevated risks of unauthorized control and system-level interference if appropriate remediation actions are not applied promptly.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerabilities tracked under CVE-2026-20357 originate from structural deficiencies in access control enforcement within Cisco Crosswork products, specifically categorized under CWE-306 (Missing Authentication for Critical Function). The root cause of the issue lies in the application architecture failing to enforce authentication checks prior to executing sensitive programmatic routines and critical system functions. Consequently, critical endpoints responsible for handling privileged operations accept incoming execution requests directly from the network layer without verifying whether the session is authenticated or authorized.\nThe exploitation method relies on sending crafted network requests directly to exposed functional components or application programming interfaces (APIs) that lack proper session validation and access restriction mechanisms. Because the application processes these requests in the absence of valid authentication tokens or credentials, an attacker can invoke restricted functions remotely. The attack flow proceeds as follows: First, the threat actor identifies or targets the vulnerable endpoints within the Cisco Crosswork deployment through network reconnaissance or analysis of application routing. Second, the attacker formulates an unauthenticated payload designed to invoke the targeted critical function. Third, the attacker transmits the request over the network to the affected component. Finally, the application processes the payload and executes the privileged operation, bypassing standard authorization gates entirely.\nThe vulnerable components involve internal application modules and functional handlers within Cisco Crosswork that perform critical administrative or operational tasks. The vulnerability requires network exposure to the affected service endpoints, allowing remote interaction without authentication or privilege requirements. The post-exploitation impact includes unauthorized execution of critical functions, potential compromise of system functionality, and loss of confidentiality and integrity within the affected Cisco Crosswork environment."
}