What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-12689

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-05-07 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

An issue was discovered in OpenStack Keystone before 15.0.1, and 16.0.0. Any user authenticated within a limited scope (trust/oauth/application credential) can create an EC2 credential with an escalated permission, such as obtaining admin while the user is on a limited viewer role. This potentially allows a malicious user to act as the admin on a project another user has the admin role on, which can effectively grant that user global admin privileges.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 18.04
• OpenStack Keystone: before 15.0.1; 16.0.0 — fixed in 15.0.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: OpenStack Keystone 15.0.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/07/2
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/keystone/+bug/1872735
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/re4ffc55cd2f1b55a26e07c83b3c22c3fe4bae6054d000a57fb48d8c2%40%3Ccommits.druid.apache.org%3E
• https://security.openstack.org/ossa/OSSA-2020-004.html
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4480-1/
• https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/06/5
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/07/2
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/keystone/+bug/1872735
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/re4ffc55cd2f1b55a26e07c83b3c22c3fe4bae6054d000a57fb48d8c2%40%3Ccommits.druid.apache.org%3E
• https://security.openstack.org/ossa/OSSA-2020-004.html
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4480-1/
• https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/06/5

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