Headline
CVE-2023-22482: JWT audience claim is not verified
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. Versions of Argo CD starting with v1.8.2 and prior to 2.3.13, 2.4.19, 2.5.6, and 2.6.0-rc-3 are vulnerable to an improper authorization bug causing the API to accept certain invalid tokens. OIDC providers include an aud (audience) claim in signed tokens. The value of that claim specifies the intended audience(s) of the token (i.e. the service or services which are meant to accept the token). Argo CD does validate that the token was signed by Argo CD’s configured OIDC provider. But Argo CD does not validate the audience claim, so it will accept tokens that are not intended for Argo CD. If Argo CD’s configured OIDC provider also serves other audiences (for example, a file storage service), then Argo CD will accept a token intended for one of those other audiences. Argo CD will grant the user privileges based on the token’s groups claim, even though those groups were not intended to be used by Argo CD. This bug also increases the impact of a stolen token. If an attacker steals a valid token for a different audience, they can use it to access Argo CD. A patch for this vulnerability has been released in versions 2.6.0-rc3, 2.5.6, 2.4.19, and 2.3.13. There are no workarounds.
Impact
All versions of Argo CD starting with v1.8.2 are vulnerable to an improper authorization bug causing the API to accept certain invalid tokens.
OIDC providers include an aud (audience) claim in signed tokens. The value of that claim specifies the intended audience(s) of the token (i.e. the service or services which are meant to accept the token). Argo CD does validate that the token was signed by Argo CD’s configured OIDC provider. But Argo CD does not validate the audience claim, so it will accept tokens that are not intended for Argo CD.
If Argo CD’s configured OIDC provider also serves other audiences (for example, a file storage service), then Argo CD will accept a token intended for one of those other audiences. Argo CD will grant the user privileges based on the token’s groups claim, even though those groups were not intended to be used by Argo CD.
This bug also increases the blast radius of a stolen token. If an attacker steals a valid token for a different audience, they can use it to access Argo CD.
Patches
A patch for this vulnerability has been released in the following Argo CD versions:
- v2.6.0-rc5
- v2.5.8
- v2.4.20
- v2.3.14
The patch introduces a new allowedAudiences to the OIDC config block. By default, the client ID is the only allowed audience. Users who want Argo CD to accept tokens intended for a different audience may use allowedAudiences to specify those audiences.
apiVersion: v1 kind: ConfigMap metadata: name: argocd-cm data: oidc.config: | name: Example allowedAudiences: - audience-1 - audience-2 - argocd-client-id # If `allowedAudiences` is non-empty, Argo CD’s client ID must be explicitly added if you want to allow it.
Even though the OIDC spec requires the audience claim, some tokens may not include it. To avoid a breaking change in a patch release, versions < 2.6.0 of Argo CD will skip the audience claim check for tokens that have no audience. In versions >= 2.6.0, Argo CD will reject all tokens which do not have an audience claim. Users can opt into the old behavior by setting an option:
apiVersion: v1 kind: ConfigMap metadata: name: argocd-cm data: oidc.config: | name: Example skipAudienceCheckWhenTokenHasNoAudience: true
Workarounds
There is no workaround besides upgrading.
Credits
The Argo CD team would like to express their gratitude to Vladimir Pouzanov (@farcaller) from Indeed, who discovered the issue, reported it confidentially according to our guidelines, and actively worked with the project to provide a remedy. Many thanks to Vladimir!
References
- How to configure OIDC in Argo CD
- OIDC spec section discussing the audience claim
- JWT spec section discussing the audience claim
For more information
- Open an issue in the Argo CD issue tracker or discussions
- Join us on Slack in channel #argo-cd
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### Impact All versions of Argo CD starting with v1.8.2 are vulnerable to an improper authorization bug causing the API to accept certain invalid tokens. OIDC providers include an `aud` (audience) claim in signed tokens. The value of that claim specifies the intended audience(s) of the token (i.e. the service or services which are meant to accept the token). Argo CD _does_ validate that the token was signed by Argo CD's configured OIDC provider. But Argo CD _does not_ validate the audience claim, so it will accept tokens that are not intended for Argo CD. If Argo CD's configured OIDC provider also serves other audiences (for example, a file storage service), then Argo CD will accept a token intended for one of those other audiences. Argo CD will grant the user privileges based on the token's `groups` claim, even though those groups were not intended to be used by Argo CD. This bug also increases the blast radius of a stolen token. If an attacker steals a valid token for a different...
An update is now available for Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.5.9 Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.This content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). If you distribute this content, or a modified version of it, you must provide attribution to Red Hat Inc. and provide a link to the original. Related CVEs: * CVE-2023-22482: ArgoCD: JWT audience claim is not verified
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