CVE-2023-22738 in vantage6
Summary
by MITRE • 03/01/2023
vantage6 is a privacy preserving federated learning infrastructure for secure insight exchange. Assigning existing users to a different organizations is currently possible. It may lead to unintended access: if a user from organization A is accidentally assigned to organization B, they will retain their permissions and therefore might be able to access stuff they should not be allowed to access. This issue is patched in version 3.8.0.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 03/30/2023
The vantage6 platform represents a privacy-preserving federated learning infrastructure designed to enable secure insight exchange between organizations while maintaining data sovereignty. This system facilitates collaborative machine learning workflows where sensitive data remains distributed across multiple organizations without being centralized, making it particularly valuable for industries such as healthcare, finance, and research where data privacy is paramount. The platform's architecture relies on strict access controls and organizational boundaries to ensure that users can only access data and resources within their designated organizational scope.
The vulnerability identified in CVE-2023-22738 stems from a critical flaw in the user assignment and permission management system. Specifically, the platform allows administrators to reassign existing users from one organization to another without properly revoking their previous permissions. This represents a classic privilege escalation issue where users maintain access rights to resources beyond their intended organizational boundaries. The technical flaw manifests in the permission inheritance mechanism, where user session tokens and access controls are not properly synchronized when organizational assignments change, creating a persistent access gap that can be exploited by both malicious actors and accidental misconfigurations.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple access control bypasses and represents a significant security risk within federated learning environments. When a user from organization A is reassigned to organization B, they retain all their previous permissions, potentially allowing them to access sensitive datasets, models, or administrative functions belonging to organization B. This creates a scenario where data leakage could occur through unauthorized access to confidential information, undermining the fundamental security guarantees that federated learning platforms are designed to provide. The vulnerability particularly threatens environments where organizations handle highly sensitive data, as it could enable cross-organizational data access that violates privacy regulations and compliance requirements such as gdpr, hipaa, or other data protection frameworks.
This vulnerability aligns with CWE-284, which describes improper access control issues where entities have more access than they should possess, and can be mapped to ATT&CK technique T1078.004 for valid accounts and T1531 for lateral movement through compromised accounts. The issue demonstrates a failure in the principle of least privilege implementation, where access control decisions are not properly enforced during user assignment changes. Organizations utilizing vantage6 must consider the broader implications of this flaw within their security posture, particularly in environments where strict data isolation is required. The remediation in version 3.8.0 addresses this through improved permission synchronization mechanisms that properly invalidate existing user sessions and enforce fresh access control checks when organizational assignments change, ensuring that users cannot maintain unauthorized access across organizational boundaries.