CVE-2017-7517 is an input validation vulnerability affecting Hawkular Metrics as shipped in Red Hat OpenShift 3.x. Hawkular Metrics is a monitoring and metrics collection system integrated with OpenShift Enterprise, where tenants in Hawkular Metrics correspond directly to projects or namespaces in OpenShift. The vulnerability arises because when a user creates a project (e.g., "MyProject") in OpenShift, Hawkular Metrics creates a corresponding tenant to store metrics data. If the project is deleted, the tenant in Hawkular Metrics is not properly cleaned up or isolated. Consequently, if another user later creates a new project with the same name "MyProject", they gain access to the metrics data stored from the original project instance. This is due to a 1:1 mapping without proper tenant isolation or validation, leading to unauthorized access to potentially sensitive metrics data. The vulnerability is classified under CWE-20 (Improper Input Validation), indicating that the system does not adequately validate or segregate tenant identifiers. The CVSS v3.1 base score is 3.5 (low severity), reflecting that the attack vector is network-based, requires low attack complexity, privileges, and user interaction, but the impact is limited to confidentiality with no integrity or availability impact. There are no known exploits in the wild, and no patches are explicitly linked in the provided data, but remediation would involve improving tenant isolation and cleanup in Hawkular Metrics when projects are deleted in OpenShift.

For European organizations using Red Hat OpenShift 3.x with Hawkular Metrics, this vulnerability could lead to unauthorized disclosure of monitoring data between projects. While the metrics data may not contain highly sensitive information like credentials, it can reveal operational details, performance metrics, or usage patterns that could be leveraged for further reconnaissance or lateral movement within the environment. This could undermine data confidentiality and trust boundaries between different teams or tenants sharing the same OpenShift cluster. In regulated industries common in Europe, such as finance, healthcare, or critical infrastructure, leakage of operational metrics might violate data protection policies or compliance requirements. However, since the vulnerability does not affect data integrity or availability, the direct operational impact is limited. The requirement for privileges and user interaction reduces the risk of widespread exploitation, but insider threats or compromised accounts could exploit this to gain unauthorized insights.

To mitigate this vulnerability, European organizations should: 1) Upgrade to a newer version of OpenShift and Hawkular Metrics where tenant isolation and cleanup issues are addressed. If no official patch exists, consider disabling Hawkular Metrics or restricting its use until a fix is available. 2) Implement strict project lifecycle management policies ensuring that when projects are deleted, all associated Hawkular Metrics tenants and data are also securely deleted or isolated. 3) Enforce role-based access controls (RBAC) rigorously to limit who can create or delete projects and access metrics data, minimizing the risk of unauthorized tenant reuse. 4) Monitor and audit project creation and deletion events alongside metrics access logs to detect suspicious reuse of project names or unauthorized access patterns. 5) Consider segregating critical workloads into separate OpenShift clusters to reduce cross-tenant data leakage risks. 6) Educate users about the risks of reusing project names and encourage unique naming conventions to reduce accidental data exposure.