Red Hat FreeIPA Kerberos Principal Name Uniqueness privileges management

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability marked as very critical has been reported in Red Hat FreeIPA. This vulnerability affects unknown code of the component Kerberos Principal Name Uniqueness. This manipulation causes privileges management. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-13097. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. There is no exploit available.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Red Hat FreeIPA (the affected version is unknown). It has been declared as very critical. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown code of the component Kerberos Principal Name Uniqueness. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a privileges management vulnerability. The CWE definition for the vulnerability is CWE-269. The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor. As an impact it is known to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

A privilege escalation flaw was found in FreeIPA. The uniqueness constraint enforced on Kerberos principal name attributes in the 389-ds directory server does not properly account for equivalent representations of the same principal name, allowing a user with sufficient LDAP write privileges to create a service principal that impersonates an existing privileged one. This can lead to unauthorized acquisition of Kerberos service tickets for sensitive services, potentially resulting in full domain compromise.

The advisory is shared at access.redhat.com. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2026-13097 since 06/23/2026. The exploitation appears to be easy. The attack can be launched remotely. Additional levels of successful authentication are needed for exploitation. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $5k-$25k at the moment (estimation calculated on 08/20/2026). MITRE ATT&CK project uses the attack technique T1068 for this issue.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at EUVD (EUVD-2026-63243). Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Type

• Directory Service Software

Vendor

• Red Hat

Name

• FreeIPA

License

• open-source

Website

• Vendor: https://www.redhat.com/

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Entryinfo

Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

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