Privilege Escalation in Foreman via Role Assignment

Impact Analysis

This vulnerability allows an authenticated user with certain usergroup management permissions to escalate their privileges to administrator level.

As a result, the attacker can gain full control over the Foreman system, potentially managing all users, configurations, and resources managed by Foreman.

This could lead to unauthorized changes, data exposure, or disruption of services managed by Foreman.

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Executive Summary

CVE-2026-5136 is a privilege escalation vulnerability in Foreman, a lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers.

The flaw exists because the Usergroup model in Foreman does not properly validate role assignments against the calling user's permissions. This means an authenticated user who has usergroup management permissions can assign arbitrary roles, including administrative roles, to a user group.

By exploiting this, the attacker can add themselves as a member of that user group with elevated privileges, effectively gaining administrator-level access.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability can be detected by monitoring API requests that create or update user groups with privileged roles and add users as members. Specifically, look for API calls where a user with usergroup management permissions assigns administrative roles to user groups and adds themselves as members.

Since the vulnerability involves manipulation of role assignments via API requests, inspecting logs for such suspicious API activity is recommended.

No specific commands are provided in the available resources to detect this vulnerability.

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Mitigation Strategies

Immediate mitigation steps include restricting usergroup management permissions to only trusted users, as the vulnerability requires such permissions to be exploited.

Monitor and audit user group role assignments and membership changes to detect unauthorized privilege escalations.

Apply any patches or updates provided by the Foreman or Red Hat security teams once available.

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Compliance Impact

The vulnerability allows an authenticated user to escalate their privileges to administrator-level access by manipulating role assignments improperly. This unauthorized privilege escalation can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data and system controls.

Such unauthorized access and privilege escalation can negatively impact compliance with common standards and regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, which require strict access controls and protection of sensitive information.

By enabling attackers to gain administrative privileges, the vulnerability increases the risk of data breaches, unauthorized data modification, and failure to enforce least privilege principles, all of which are critical for regulatory compliance.

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