AI analysis
CVE-2026-13097 is a privilege escalation in FreeIPA caused by the uniqueness constraint on Kerberos principal name attributes in the 389-ds directory server failing to treat equivalent representations of the same principal name as duplicates (CWE-706, incorrectly-resolved name/reference). A user with sufficient LDAP write privileges can exploit this by creating a service principal whose name is an alternate but equivalent form of an existing privileged principal, bypassing the uniqueness check. The attacker can then acquire Kerberos service tickets for sensitive services as the impersonated principal, potentially achieving full domain compromise; the flaw scores 8.7 (high) on CVSS 3.1 with a scope change from the directory server to the Kerberos realm. Affected organizations are those running FreeIPA (Red Hat Enterprise Linux IdM) with 389-ds directory services. No exploitation is known at this time, no public proof-of-concept exists, and the flaw is not in CISA KEV; EPSS puts 30-day exploitation probability at 0.3% (19th percentile), though related FreeIPA flaw-chain research (anonymous clients creating reusable administrator credentials) has drawn attention to the product.
What to do: Monitor Red Hat advisories and upgrade 389-ds-base and freeipa/IdM packages to the fixed releases for your RHEL version as soon as they are published, since no fixed version numbers are listed in the current data. Until patched, restrict LDAP write privileges on Kerberos principal name attributes to the minimum set of roles, and audit the directory for existing principals whose names are case- or format-equivalent variants of privileged principals (e.g., admin, kadmin, host and service principals). Given the related FreeIPA flaw-chain research on anonymous clients obtaining reusable administrator credentials, also review anonymous/simple-bind directory access and apply any companion FreeIPA fixes.
Affected
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux (FreeIPA/IdM with 389-ds Directory Server) | — |
| FreeIPA | — |
Estimated exposure
large≈10,000–100,000 FreeIPA/IdM servers (domain controllers and replicas) across tens of thousands of enterprise deployments — FreeIPA ships as the integrated identity-management stack for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is widely deployed in enterprise datacenters, but it typically runs on internal networks rather than internet-exposed, so this order-of-magnitude…
Order-of-magnitude estimate by the model from install counts, market share and public scan data it knows; verify before quoting.
Description
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.