CVE-2022-23726 is a medium severity vulnerability affecting Ping Identity's PingCentral product versions 1.8, 1.9, and 1.10. The vulnerability involves information exposure through Spring Boot actuator endpoints. These endpoints, when accessed with administrative authentication, return extensive sensitive environmental and application information. Spring Boot actuator endpoints are designed to provide operational information about the running application, including configuration properties, environment variables, and other runtime details. In this case, the exposure is excessive and could reveal sensitive data such as internal IP addresses, system configurations, credentials stored in environment variables, or other application secrets. The vulnerability requires administrative privileges to access the endpoints, which means an attacker must already have high-level access to the system. The CVSS 3.1 score is 5.4 (medium), reflecting that the attack vector is adjacent network (AV:A), requires high attack complexity (AC:H), high privileges (PR:H), no user interaction (UI:N), and impacts confidentiality (C:H) but not integrity or availability. The scope is changed (S:C), indicating that the vulnerability affects resources beyond the initially vulnerable component. No known exploits in the wild have been reported, and no patches are linked in the provided data, suggesting that organizations should verify their PingCentral versions and monitor for vendor patches. The root cause is classified under CWE-200 (Information Exposure), highlighting that sensitive information is disclosed to unauthorized parties or in an unintended manner.

For European organizations using PingCentral versions 1.8 to 1.10, this vulnerability poses a risk of sensitive information leakage if an attacker gains administrative access to the system. The exposed information could facilitate further attacks such as privilege escalation, lateral movement, or targeted exploitation by revealing internal network details, credentials, or configuration weaknesses. While the vulnerability does not allow direct remote exploitation without administrative privileges, the confidentiality impact is high. This is particularly concerning for organizations in regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, and government, where exposure of sensitive data could lead to compliance violations under GDPR and other data protection laws. Additionally, the exposure of internal environment details could aid threat actors in crafting more effective attacks or bypassing existing security controls. The absence of known exploits reduces immediate risk but does not eliminate the threat, especially if internal threat actors or compromised administrators exist. The medium severity rating suggests that while this is not an urgent critical vulnerability, it requires timely remediation to prevent potential information leakage and subsequent exploitation.

1. Upgrade PingCentral to the latest version provided by Ping Identity that addresses this vulnerability as soon as a patch is available. 2. Restrict access to Spring Boot actuator endpoints strictly to trusted administrators and secure the administrative authentication mechanisms with strong multi-factor authentication (MFA). 3. Implement network segmentation and firewall rules to limit access to the management interfaces of PingCentral only from authorized management networks. 4. Regularly audit and monitor access logs for unusual or unauthorized attempts to access actuator endpoints or administrative interfaces. 5. Review and minimize the amount of sensitive information exposed via actuator endpoints by customizing or disabling unnecessary actuator endpoints in the Spring Boot configuration. 6. Conduct internal penetration testing and vulnerability assessments to verify that no sensitive information is exposed beyond intended boundaries. 7. Educate administrators on the risks of exposing sensitive environment information and enforce strict credential management policies to reduce the risk of credential compromise. 8. Prepare incident response plans to quickly address any detected unauthorized access to administrative interfaces.