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🛡️ CVE-2025-59048 — aws-plugin

🟠 CVSS 8.1 — High ✅ No Known Exploit CWE-694 NVD
8.1
CVSS Score
0 Low4 Medium7 High9 Critical10

Description

OpenBao AWS Plugin Vulnerable to Cross-Account IAM Role Impersonation in AWS Auth Method

Impact

This is a cross-account impersonation vulnerability in the auth-aws plugin. The vulnerability allows an IAM role from an untrusted AWS account to authenticate by impersonating a role with the same name in a trusted account, leading to unauthorized access.

This impacts all users of the auth-aws plugin who operate in a multi-account AWS environment where IAM role names may not be unique across accounts.

The core of the vulnerability is a flawed caching mechanism that fails to validate the AWS Account ID during authentication. While the use of wildcards in a bound_iam_principal_arn configuration significantly increases the attack surface, wildcards are not a prerequisite for exploitation. The vulnerability can be exploited with specific ARN bindings if a role name collision occurs.

Successful exploitation can lead to unauthorized access to secrets, data exfiltration, and privilege escalation. Given that the only prerequisite is a duplicate role name, the severity is considered high.

Patches

This vulnerability has been patched in version 0.1.1 of the auth-aws plugin.

Users are advised to upgrade to version 0.1.1 or later to remediate this vulnerability.

Workarounds

For users who are unable to upgrade to version 0.1.1 immediately, the most effective workaround is to guarantee that IAM role names are unique across all AWS accounts that could potentially interact with your OpenBao environment. This is the most critical mitigation step.

Primary Mitigation: Audit your AWS organizations to identify and rename any duplicate IAM role names. Enforce a naming convention that includes account-specific identifiers to prevent future collisions.

While removing wildcards from your bound_iam_principal_arn configuration is still recommended as a security best practice, it will not mitigate this vulnerability if duplicate role names exist.

Credits

This vulnerability was discovered and reported by [Pavlos Karakalidis](https://github.com/pkarakal/)

How this vulnerability can be exploited

This issue can be reached over the network, attack complexity is low, an attacker needs low-level privileges on the target. No user interaction is required. The scope is unchanged, so the impact stays within the vulnerable component. Rated impact: confidentiality high, integrity high, availability none.

CVSS metrics in full

The score comes from this vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

  • Attack vector: Network — reachable from anywhere that can route to the service.
  • Attack complexity: Low — the attack works reliably, with no preparation.
  • Privileges required: Low — an ordinary user account is enough.
  • User interaction: None — nobody has to be tricked into anything.
  • Scope: Unchanged — the damage stays inside the vulnerable component.
  • Confidentiality impact: High — total loss, or loss the attacker controls.
  • Integrity impact: High — total loss, or loss the attacker controls.
  • Availability impact: None.

Weakness class

CVE-2025-59048 is classified as CWE-694: Use of Multiple Resources with Duplicate Identifier. The product uses multiple resources that can have the same identifier, in a context in which unique identifiers are required.

Affected software

CVE-2025-59048 is recorded against 2 packages.

  • aws-plugin (fixed in 0.1.1)
  • github.com/openbao/openbao-plugins

Timeline and source

Published on 23 October 2025 and last revised on 17 June 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. A vendor advisory or fix has been published. Record sourced from NVD.

References

github.com
github.com

Same weakness in other software

These advisories are the same class of weakness (CWE-694: Use of Multiple Resources with Duplicate Identifier) in other software:

Details

Severity HIGH
CVSS Score 8.1
CVSS Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
CWE CWE-694
Public Exploit ✅ No
Source NVD
Published 2025-10-23
Updated 2026-08-20
Modified 2026-06-17

Affected Packages

Software From version Fixed in
aws-plugin — 0.1.1
github.com/openbao/openbao-plugins — —

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ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the vulnerabilities listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.

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