CVE-2025-59048

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

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.

The application does not correctly enforce access controls, allowing a principal to access resources or operations beyond their granted permissions. Typical impact: unauthorized data access or execution of privileged operations.

CVE-2025-59048 has a CVSS score of 8.1 (High). The vector is network-reachable, low privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (0.1.1); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.

Kodem intelligence

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.

1. What is CVE-2025-59048? CVE-2025-59048 is a high-severity incorrect authorization vulnerability in github.com/openbao/openbao-plugins (go), affecting versions <= 0.1.0. It is fixed in 0.1.1. The application does not correctly enforce access controls, allowing a principal to access resources or operations beyond their granted permissions.
2. How severe is CVE-2025-59048? CVE-2025-59048 has a CVSS score of 8.1 (High). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
3. Which versions of github.com/openbao/openbao-plugins are affected by CVE-2025-59048? github.com/openbao/openbao-plugins (go) versions <= 0.1.0 is affected.
4. Is there a fix for CVE-2025-59048? Yes. CVE-2025-59048 is fixed in 0.1.1. Upgrade to this version or later.
5. Is CVE-2025-59048 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2025-59048 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
6. What actually determines whether CVE-2025-59048 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
7. How do I fix CVE-2025-59048? Upgrade github.com/openbao/openbao-plugins to 0.1.1 or later.