# CVE-2020-1722: Denial of service in ipa

> Attackers can cause denial of service in Identity Policy Audit servers by sending excessively long passwords, exhausting system resources.

- **Severity:** Medium 5.3 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Not needed
- **Attackable:** Over the internet
- **Victim action needed:** A user has to click or open something
- **Fix available:** Yes
- **Published:** 27 Apr 2020
- **Updated:** 4 Aug 2024
- **Also known as:** DEBIAN-CVE-2020-1722, GHSA-mvj3-pw74-8w47, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-1722

## What is CVE-2020-1722?

CVE-2020-1722 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Redhat Enterprise Linux, published on 27 Apr 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

### Official description

A flaw was found in all ipa versions 4.x.x through 4.8.0. When sending a very long password (>= 1,000,000 characters) to the server, the password hashing process could exhaust memory and CPU leading to a denial of service and the website becoming unresponsive. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

Weakness: CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-1722?

It affects 2 products.


Products: Freeipa Freeipa, Redhat Enterprise Linux.

## How do I fix CVE-2020-1722?

Apply the vendor's patch.

## Is CVE-2020-1722 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1722 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Redhat Enterprise Linux

- [CVE-2015-5284](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2015-5284/): Information disclosure in n/a (critical 9.8)
- [CVE-2026-11861](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-11861/): Freeipa: idm: ipa: freeipa: obtaining tgs with impersonating cname through trust relationships (critical 9.6)
- [CVE-2024-2698](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-2698/): Freeipa: delegation rules allow a proxy service to impersonate any user to access another target service (high 8.8)
- [CVE-2012-5631](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2012-5631/): Information disclosure in ipa (high 8.8)
- [CVE-2017-11191](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2017-11191/): Security feature bypass in n/a (high 8.8)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2020-1722 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2020-1722 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Redhat Enterprise Linux, published on 27 Apr 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.
Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1722 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Redhat Enterprise Linux. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2020-1722/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2020-1722/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2020-1722
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-1722
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2020-1722

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2020-1722/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.