OpenBao Privileged Operator Identity Group Root Escalation

Vulnerability Description

OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system. Prior to version 2.4.4, a privileged operator could use the identity group subsystem to add a root policy to a group identity group, escalating their or another user's permissions in the system. Specifically this is an issue when: an operator in the root namespace has access to identity/groups endpoints and an operator does not have policy access. Otherwise, an operator with policy access could create or modify an existing policy to grant root-equivalent permissions through the sudo capability. This issue has been patched in version 2.4.4.

References

• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/security/advisories/GHSA-7ff4-jw48-3436
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/pull/2143
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/16bb0ccd37a502930a289d434cbe4e7b4edd66e5