CVE-2025-20162 Denial of service in Cisco IOS XE Software

High 8.6 Published 7 May 2025 Updated 7 May 2025

Remote attackers can cause a denial of service by sending crafted DHCP packets, requiring a system restart to recover.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Over the internet
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: None listed

What is CVE-2025-20162?

CVE-2025-20162 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Cisco Ios Xe, published on 7 May 2025. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A vulnerability in the DHCP snooping security feature of Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a full interface queue wedge, which could result in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of DHCP request packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending DHCP request packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause packets to wedge in the queue, creating a DoS condition for downstream devices of the affected system and requiring that the system restart to drain the queue. Note: This vulnerability can be exploited with either unicast or broadcast DHCP packets on a VLAN that does not have DHCP snooping enabled.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-20162?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Cisco Ios Xe.

How do I fix CVE-2025-20162?

No fix has been published for CVE-2025-20162 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2025-20162 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-20162 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Cisco Ios Xe vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as GHSA-p84x-683q-c49j.