CVE-2023-23612 Issue with whitespace in JWT roles in OpenSearch
Authenticated users can claim unauthorized roles by exploiting whitespace trimming in JWT processing, leading to privilege escalation.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-23612?
CVE-2023-23612 is a medium-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in opensearch-project security, published on 24 Jan 2023. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.
Official description
OpenSearch is an open source distributed and RESTful search engine. OpenSearch uses JWTs to store role claims obtained from the Identity Provider (IdP) when the authentication backend is SAML or OpenID Connect. There is an issue in how those claims are processed from the JWTs where the leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed, allowing users to potentially claim roles they are not assigned to if any role matches the whitespace-stripped version of the roles they are a member of. This issue is only present for authenticated users, and it requires either the existence of roles that match, not considering leading/trailing whitespace, or the ability for users to create said matching roles. In addition, the Identity Provider must allow leading and trailing spaces in role names. OpenSearch 1.0.0-1.3.7 and 2.0.0-2.4.1 are affected. Users are advised to upgrade to OpenSearch 1.3.8 or 2.5.0. There are no known workarounds for this issue.
Weakness: CWE-287
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-23612?
4 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.opensearch.plugin:opensearch-security. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
org.opensearch.plugin:opensearch-security Maven | All versions | 1.3.8 |
org.opensearch.plugin:opensearch-security Maven | All versions | 1.3.8 |
org.opensearch.plugin:opensearch-security Maven | From 2.0.0 | 2.5.0 |
org.opensearch.plugin:opensearch-security Maven | From 2.0.0 | 2.5.0 |
Products include Amazon Opensearch.
How do I fix CVE-2023-23612?
Upgrade org.opensearch.plugin:opensearch-security to a fixed version for your release line: 1.3.8 or 2.5.0.
Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.
Is CVE-2023-23612 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-23612 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in opensearch-project security
- CVE-2022-31115 Unsafe YAML deserialization in opensearch-ruby
- CVE-2025-9624 OpenSearch 3.2.0 - Nested Boolean/Disjunction asymmetric DoS
- CVE-2022-35980 OpenSearch vulnerable to Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information
- CVE-2022-41918 Issue with fine-grained access control of indices backing data streams
- CVE-2023-23933 Issue in Anomaly Detection with document and field level rules in numerical feature aggregations
Sources
Also known as GHSA-864v-6qj7-62qj, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-23612.