CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-12689 — An issue was discovered in OpenStack Keystone before 15.0.1, and 16.0.0

High CVSS 8.8

An issue was discovered in OpenStack Keystone before 15.0.1, and 16.0.0. Any user authenticated within a limited scope (trust/oauth/application credential) can create an EC2 credential with an escalated permission, such as obtaining admin while the user is on a limited viewer role. This potentially allows a malicious user to act as the admin on a project another user has the admin role on, which can effectively grant that user global admin privileges.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.8 (3.1)
Published
2020-05-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-269

Affected products

  • openstack / keystone
  • openstack / keystone / 16.0.0
  • canonical / ubuntu_linux / 18.04

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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