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GHSA-qvp4-rpmr-xwrr

HighCVSS 7.5 / 10
Published Jun 23, 2021·Last modified Mar 13, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

Impact

When you make a request to an endpoint that requires the scope foo using an access token granted with that foo scope, introspection will be valid and that token will be cached. The problem comes when a second requests to an endpoint that requires the scope bar is made before the cache has expired. Whether the token is granted or not to the bar scope, introspection will be valid.

Patches

A patch will be released with v0.38.12-beta.1.

Workarounds

Per default, caching is disabled for the oauth2_introspection authenticator. When caching is disabled, this vulnerability does not exist.

Trace

The cache is checked in func (a *AuthenticatorOAuth2Introspection) Authenticate(...). From tokenFromCache() it seems that it only validates the token expiration date, but ignores whether the token has or not the proper scopes.

Post-Mortem

The vulnerability was introduced in PR #424. During review, we failed to require appropriate test coverage by the submitter which is the primary reason that the vulnerability passed the review process.

To avoid this from happening again we enabled codecov with a strict policy on the Ory Oathkeeper repository: Without an increase in code coverage the PR can not be merged.

To address this issue and any regressions we have added a test suite ensuring that the cache behaviour is correct in the different scenarios:

  • Scope strategy is none, cache is enabled, and requested_scope is not empty -> cache will not be used;
  • Scope strategy is none, cache is enabled, and requested_scope is empty -> cache will be used;
  • Scope strategy is not none, cache is enabled, and requested_scope is not empty -> cache will be used;

as well as validating if iss, aud, exp, token_use, and scope are validated.

Additionally, we added CodeQL scanning to the CI.

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.5

The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the confidentiality of the information.

Threat Intelligence
6.9

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
N/A

Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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