FreeIPA CVE-2025-7493: Brief Summary of a Critical Host-to-Domain Admin Privilege Escalation Flaw

Introduction

Attackers can escalate privileges from a regular host to a domain administrator in FreeIPA deployments, potentially gaining full control over authentication and authorization for an entire enterprise. This flaw exposes sensitive data and administrative interfaces to unauthorized users, making it a critical concern for organizations relying on FreeIPA for centralized identity management.

About FreeIPA: FreeIPA is an open-source identity management solution, primarily developed by Red Hat, that provides centralized authentication, authorization, and account management for Linux and UNIX environments. It is widely used in enterprise settings, especially those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and integrates LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and certificate management. FreeIPA is a foundational component for many organizations' security and access control infrastructure.

Technical Information

CVE-2025-7493 is a privilege escalation vulnerability caused by FreeIPA's failure to enforce uniqueness of the krbCanonicalName attribute for the root@REALM principal. This issue is closely related to CVE-2025-4404, which previously addressed similar concerns for admin@REALM but did not extend protections to root@REALM.

Vulnerability Mechanism:

• FreeIPA uses the krbCanonicalName attribute to uniquely identify Kerberos principals within a realm.
• Prior to this vulnerability, FreeIPA did not validate that root@REALM was unique across all entries.
• An attacker with sufficient privileges (such as the ability to create host or service entries) could register a new LDAP entry with krbCanonicalName set to root@REALM.
• This allows the attacker to request Kerberos tickets as root@REALM, effectively granting them domain administrator privileges.
• The vulnerability is classified under CWE-1220 (Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity).

Root Cause:

• The patch for CVE-2025-4404 added validation for admin@REALM but did not include root@REALM.
• As a result, root@REALM could still be used as a canonical name for new entries, bypassing intended administrative controls.

Attack Flow:

1. Attacker with LDAP write access creates a new host or service entry with krbCanonicalName: root@REALM.
2. Attacker requests a Kerberos ticket for root@REALM.
3. The ticket grants domain administrator privileges, enabling full control over the FreeIPA realm.

No public code snippets were found in the referenced sources.

Affected Systems and Versions

• FreeIPA deployments that have not applied the latest validation fixes for krbCanonicalName uniqueness (as of September 2025)
• The vulnerability specifically affects configurations where users have privileges to create host or service entries
• The issue is present in versions patched for CVE-2025-4404 but not yet patched for CVE-2025-7493
• Consult Red Hat advisories and FreeIPA release notes for exact affected version numbers

Vendor Security History

• FreeIPA previously suffered from CVE-2025-4404, a similar privilege escalation flaw involving admin@REALM
• Red Hat has a history of rapid response to critical vulnerabilities in FreeIPA, typically releasing coordinated advisories and patches
• The recurrence of similar issues suggests ongoing challenges in enforcing unique identity constraints in FreeIPA's Kerberos integration

References

• NVD entry for CVE-2025-7493
• Red Hat Bugzilla: 2389448