Privilege Escalation in Azure DevOps: Deep Dive into CVE-2025-47158 Authentication Bypass

When attackers can silently bypass authentication in your CI/CD pipeline, the consequences are immediate: source code theft, supply chain compromise, and privilege escalation across your entire DevOps infrastructure. CVE-2025-47158 is one such critical flaw in Azure DevOps, enabling unauthorized access through a subtle yet devastating manipulation of assumed-immutable data.

Technical Information

Vulnerability Mechanism

CVE-2025-47158 is classified under CWE-302: Authentication Bypass by Assumed-Immutable Data. The vulnerability is rooted in Azure DevOps' improper trust in identity claims or tokens that are presumed to be immutable. Attackers exploit this by crafting malicious requests containing forged identity tokens or claims. Azure DevOps, failing to rigorously validate these inputs, processes them as legitimate—granting attackers unauthorized access and the ability to escalate privileges.

Exploitation Flow

A typical attack involves:

Crafting a Forged Token: The attacker generates a token or claim mimicking a privileged user.
Sending the Malicious Request: The forged token is sent to a vulnerable endpoint, such as the Pipeline Job Token Handler.
Privilege Escalation: Azure DevOps accepts the manipulated data, granting the attacker elevated access to pipelines, source code, and deployment environments.

Example Attack Payload

POST /vulnerable/authentication/endpoint HTTP/1.1
Host: devops.example.com
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "immutable_data": "Spoofed_identity_claim"
}

Root Cause

The core issue is insufficient validation of identity assertions. Azure DevOps treats certain authentication data as immutable, but attackers can forge or tamper with these values over the network, bypassing intended security controls.

Affected Components

Azure DevOps Server (all versions prior to June 2025 security patches)
Pipeline Job Token Handler
Visual Studio integrations relying on flawed token-handling logic

Patch Information

The patch addressing CVE-2025-47158 ensures that Azure DevOps components are updated to mitigate the authentication bypass. The update modifies input handling to prevent exploitation by strengthening validation and restricting unauthorized access paths. Apply the patch immediately via the Microsoft Security Update Guide.

Affected Systems and Versions

Azure DevOps Server: All versions prior to the June 2025 security patches
Visual Studio integrations: Any integration using pre-June 2025 Azure DevOps token logic
Pipeline Job Token Handler: Vulnerable in unpatched deployments

Vendor Security History

Microsoft Azure DevOps has faced several high-impact authentication and token-handling vulnerabilities in recent years, including CVE-2025-29813. Microsoft typically releases patches within a month of disclosure, but the recurrence of similar flaws highlights ongoing architectural challenges in authentication workflows.

References

Source: This report was created using AI

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