CVE-2020-14325
📋 TL;DR
CVE-2020-14325 is an authorization bypass vulnerability in Red Hat CloudForms that allows attackers to impersonate users and create accounts with super administrator privileges. This enables complete compromise of the CloudForms management system. Organizations running CloudForms versions before 5.11.7.0 are affected.
💻 Affected Systems
- Red Hat CloudForms
📦 What is this software?
⚠️ Risk & Real-World Impact
Worst Case
Complete compromise of CloudForms infrastructure allowing attackers to manage virtual machines, modify configurations, access sensitive data, and pivot to other systems in the environment.
Likely Case
Attackers gain administrative access to CloudForms, enabling them to create/manage VMs, access cloud credentials, and potentially compromise the broader cloud infrastructure.
If Mitigated
Limited impact if proper network segmentation and access controls prevent unauthorized access to CloudForms management interfaces.
🎯 Exploit Status
The vulnerability allows unauthenticated API access to create super administrator accounts. Exploitation requires network access to CloudForms API endpoints.
🛠️ Fix & Mitigation
✅ Official Fix
Patch Version: 5.11.7.0 and later
Vendor Advisory: https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2020-14325
Restart Required: Yes
Instructions:
1. Update CloudForms to version 5.11.7.0 or later via Red Hat Satellite or directly. 2. Apply the update to all CloudForms appliances. 3. Restart the CloudForms services after update completion.
🔧 Temporary Workarounds
Network Access Restriction
linuxRestrict network access to CloudForms management interfaces to only trusted administrative networks.
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-rich-rule='rule family="ipv4" source address="TRUSTED_NETWORK" port protocol="tcp" port="443" accept'
firewall-cmd --reload
🧯 If You Can't Patch
- Implement strict network segmentation to isolate CloudForms management interfaces from untrusted networks
- Enable detailed API access logging and monitor for unauthorized user creation or privilege escalation attempts
🔍 How to Verify
Check if Vulnerable:
Check CloudForms version via the web interface (Settings → About) or SSH to appliance and run: cat /var/www/miq/vmdb/VERSIONCheck Version:
cat /var/www/miq/vmdb/VERSIONVerify Fix Applied:
Verify version is 5.11.7.0 or higher. Test API endpoints for user impersonation functionality.📡 Detection & Monitoring
Log Indicators:
- Unauthorized API calls to user creation endpoints
- Unexpected creation of EvmGroup-super_administrator accounts
- API requests from unexpected IP addresses
Network Indicators:
- Unusual API traffic patterns to CloudForms management interfaces
- Requests to user impersonation endpoints from non-admin sources
SIEM Query:
source="cloudforms" AND (event="user_create" OR event="api_call") AND (user="*super_administrator*" OR status="unauthorized")