CVE-2025-54955 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 08/03/2025
OpenNebula Community Edition (CE) before 7.0.0 and Enterprise Edition (EE) before 6.10.3 have a critical FireEdge race condition that can lead to full account takeover. By exploiting this, an unauthenticated attacker can obtain a valid JSON Web Token (JWT) belonging to a legitimate user without knowledge of their credentials.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 08/05/2025
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2025-54955 represents a critical race condition flaw within OpenNebula Community Edition versions prior to 7.0.0 and Enterprise Edition versions prior to 6.10.3. This issue specifically affects the FireEdge component which serves as the web-based management interface for OpenNebula cloud environments. The race condition manifests in a way that allows unauthenticated attackers to exploit a timing vulnerability in the authentication process, ultimately enabling them to obtain valid JSON Web Tokens that belong to legitimate users. This vulnerability directly violates fundamental security principles by allowing unauthorized access to user sessions without requiring valid credentials, effectively bypassing the authentication mechanism entirely.
The technical implementation of this race condition occurs within the FireEdge authentication flow where concurrent requests can interfere with the token generation and validation process. When multiple requests are processed simultaneously, the system fails to properly synchronize access to shared resources during token creation, allowing an attacker to manipulate the timing of their requests to intercept or forge valid JWT tokens. This flaw aligns with CWE-367 which describes the weakness of time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities, where the state of a resource changes between the time it is checked and when it is used. The vulnerability creates an opportunity for attackers to exploit temporal inconsistencies in the authentication system, particularly when legitimate users are authenticated and their tokens are being generated or validated.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe and far-reaching for any organization utilizing affected OpenNebula deployments. An unauthenticated attacker who successfully exploits this race condition can gain full administrative privileges for the targeted user account, potentially leading to complete system compromise. This includes access to all virtual machines, storage resources, network configurations, and user data managed through the OpenNebula platform. The implications extend beyond individual account compromise as attackers could leverage these stolen tokens to move laterally within the cloud environment, potentially accessing other user accounts or system resources. The vulnerability also violates the principle of least privilege by allowing attackers to impersonate legitimate users without requiring any knowledge of passwords or other authentication factors.
Organizations should immediately implement mitigation strategies including upgrading to OpenNebula versions 7.0.0 or later for Community Edition and 6.10.3 or later for Enterprise Edition where the race condition has been addressed through proper synchronization mechanisms. Network-level protections should include implementing strict access controls and monitoring for unusual authentication patterns or token generation requests. The implementation of additional security layers such as multi-factor authentication and enhanced session management can provide defense-in-depth against similar vulnerabilities. Security teams should also conduct thorough audits of their OpenNebula deployments to identify any potential exploitation attempts and establish monitoring procedures that can detect anomalous behavior patterns consistent with race condition exploitation attempts. This vulnerability demonstrates the critical importance of proper concurrency control in authentication systems and aligns with ATT&CK technique T1566 which covers credential harvesting through various attack vectors including exploitation of software vulnerabilities that bypass authentication mechanisms.