Back to vendor advisories
Cisco Security Advisoriescisco-sa-sec-client-priv-esc-muF8eZdm

Cisco Secure Client Secure Firewall Posture Module Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

High 1 CVE Published Oct 21, 2026 at 4:00 PM UTC

Summary

A vulnerability in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of the Secure Firewall Posture module in Cisco Secure Client could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate privileges on an affected device.

This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of crafted IPC messages to a local socket. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform limited file write operations on the filesystem with SYSTEM or root privileges.

Although this vulnerability affects the Secure Firewall Posture module in Cisco Secure Client on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems, this vulnerability could be used to obtain full root privileges on macOS and Linux. For that reason Cisco has assigned this security advisory a Security Impact Rating (SIR) of High rather than Medium as the score indicates.

Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

Products covered

A separate affected-products list was not included in the collected bulletin.

Remediation

There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

Cisco considers any workarounds and mitigations (if applicable) to be temporary solutions until an upgrade to a fixed software release is available. To remediate this vulnerability and avoid future exposure as described in this advisory, Cisco strongly recommends that customers upgrade to the fixed software indicated in this advisory.

Fixed Releases

In the following table, the left column lists Cisco software releases. The right column indicates whether a release is affected by the vulnerability that is described in this advisory and the first release that includes the fix for this vulnerability. Customers are advised to upgrade to an appropriate fixed software release as indicated in this section.

Cisco Secure Client Release

First Fixed Release

Earlier than 5.1.20.333

5.1.20.333

The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) validates only the affected and fixed release information that is documented in this advisory.

CVEs in this advisory 1

Updates

  1. Published by Cisco

    The publication date reported by the vendor.

  2. Added to SecurityAlert

    We collected the advisory from the official source.