CVE-2026-20301

high
Published 2026-08-05 · Modified 2026-08-05
CVSS v3
8.6
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
8.6

Description

A vulnerability in the Extensible Messaging Client Protocol (XMCP), also referred to as the External Client protocol, of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to improper handling of malformed XMCP packets. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malformed XMCP packet to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition. The attacker does not need the XMCP client username to exploit this vulnerability.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
91%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

CWEs

CWE-606

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.