CVE-2025-30421 National Instruments CVE debrief

Who should care

Organizations using National Instruments Circuit Design Suite, especially teams that exchange, review, or open SYM files, and security/IT staff responsible for engineering or ICS-adjacent workstation patching.

Technical summary

The advisory describes a stack-based buffer overflow caused by improper input validation in Circuit Design Suite. The supplied CVSS v3.1 vector is AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H, scored 7.8 (High). The practical trigger is user interaction: an attacker must get a user to open a specially crafted SYM file. The affected product scope in the CSAF data is National Instruments Circuit Design Suite version 14.3.0 and earlier.

Defensive priority

High — prioritize remediation on any system running an affected version, because the issue can lead to arbitrary code execution and requires only user interaction to trigger.

Recommended defensive actions

• Update National Instruments Circuit Design Suite to version 14.3.1 or later, as recommended by the vendor.
• Inventory installations to find any deployment of Circuit Design Suite version 14.3.0 or earlier.
• Treat SYM files from unverified or unexpected sources as suspicious and review file-handling workflows accordingly.
• Apply general industrial control system hardening and defense-in-depth guidance from the CISA resources linked in the advisory.
• Validate remediation after patching and confirm affected users are on the fixed release.

Evidence notes

All core facts in this debrief are taken from the supplied CISA CSAF advisory ICSA-25-140-02 and the linked National Instruments security update. The source states the vulnerability type (stack-based buffer overflow), cause (improper input validation), trigger condition (user opens a specially crafted SYM file), affected product/version range (National Instruments Circuit Design Suite <=14.3.0), and remediation (14.3.1 or later). The supplied CVE and source timestamps are both 2025-05-20T06:00:00Z. No KEV listing or ransomware-campaign linkage is present in the supplied enrichment.

Official resources