Cisco Secure Client Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

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.

Source published

21 Oct 2026 16:14:19 UTC

Source modified

22 Oct 2026 23:04:52 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

Source terms

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CVSS 3.1 · 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N