CVE-2026-20136 Cisco Identity Services Engine Authenticated Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

Medium 6.0 Published 15 Apr 2026 Updated 16 Apr 2026

An authenticated local attacker with admin privileges can inject commands into the CLI to escalate privileges to root on Cisco ISE.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: An administrator
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: None listed

What is CVE-2026-20136?

CVE-2026-20136 is a medium-severity command injection vulnerability in Cisco Identity Services Engine, published on 15 Apr 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrative privileges to perform a command injection attack on the underlying operating system and elevate privileges to root. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by providing crafted input to a specific CLI command. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to elevate their privileges to root on the underlying operating system.

Weakness: CWE-116

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-20136?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Cisco Identity Services Engine, Cisco Identity Services Engine Passive Identity Connector.

How do I fix CVE-2026-20136?

No fix has been published for CVE-2026-20136 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, and pass arguments to programs as a list instead of through a shell. More about Command injection.

Is CVE-2026-20136 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-20136 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Cisco Identity Services Engine vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as GHSA-hj84-36vf-hc6f.