Privilege Escalation via JIT Provisioning in Federated Authentication

Executive Summary

This vulnerability involves the silent Just-In-Time (JIT) provisioning feature used in federated authentication systems. When a federated user shares the same username as a local user, the JIT provisioning process can overwrite the existing roles of the local user with the roles assigned to the federated user. This happens because the system fails to properly segregate user roles during account creation.

Exploitation requires that the federated identity provider (IDP) has silent JIT provisioning enabled and that the attacker knows the username of a local user. Under these conditions, an attacker can manipulate the provisioning process to change the roles of local users.

The roles overwritten are limited to those defined by the federated IDP, which usually grant minimal access rights unless the federated IDP administrator has configured them otherwise.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can impact you by allowing an attacker to modify the roles of local users in your system if they know a local username and the federated IDP uses silent JIT provisioning. This could lead to unauthorized changes in user permissions.

Although the overwritten roles are typically limited to minimal access rights, if the federated IDP administrator has configured roles with higher privileges, an attacker could potentially escalate privileges or disrupt normal access controls.

The CVSS score of 4.8 indicates a moderate severity, reflecting that the vulnerability requires network access with high attack complexity and no privileges or user interaction, and impacts integrity and availability.

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