CVE-2023-5455 identifies a Cross-Site Request Forgery vulnerability in the ipa/session/login_password endpoint of the Identity, Policy, and Audit (IPA) service on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The vulnerability arises because certain HTTP endpoints in FreeIPA do not enforce CSRF protections, allowing an attacker to craft malicious requests that an authenticated user might unknowingly submit. This can result in unauthorized actions performed with the user's privileges, impacting system integrity. However, due to implementation specifics, attackers cannot exploit this flaw to reflect or reuse existing session cookies representing logged-in users; instead, they must induce a new authentication attempt, requiring user interaction. The vulnerability has a CVSS 3.1 base score of 6.5, indicating medium severity. It does not impact confidentiality directly but threatens integrity by enabling unauthorized state-changing requests. No public exploits have been reported yet, but the flaw was discovered during community penetration testing. The vulnerability affects all supported versions of IPA on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, a widely used enterprise Linux distribution, especially in server and infrastructure environments.

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a moderate risk primarily to the integrity of systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with IPA services. Attackers could leverage CSRF to perform unauthorized actions on behalf of users, potentially altering configurations or policies managed by IPA. While confidentiality is not directly compromised, unauthorized changes could lead to broader security issues or service disruptions. Organizations in sectors such as government, finance, telecommunications, and critical infrastructure that rely on IPA for identity and policy management are particularly at risk. The requirement for user interaction and new authentication attempts limits the ease of exploitation but does not eliminate the threat, especially in environments where users might be targeted via phishing or malicious websites. The lack of known exploits in the wild reduces immediate risk but should not lead to complacency given the potential impact on system integrity.

To mitigate CVE-2023-5455, European organizations should: 1) Apply any available patches or updates from Red Hat promptly once released, as patching is the most effective defense. 2) Implement or verify strict CSRF protections on all IPA HTTP endpoints, ensuring tokens are validated for state-changing requests. 3) Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) to reduce the risk of unauthorized authentication attempts induced by CSRF. 4) Educate users about the risks of phishing and malicious websites that could trigger CSRF attacks, emphasizing cautious behavior when interacting with unknown links. 5) Monitor IPA logs and network traffic for unusual or unauthorized requests that could indicate exploitation attempts. 6) Consider network segmentation and access controls to limit exposure of IPA services to only trusted networks and users. 7) Regularly review and update security policies related to identity and access management to incorporate lessons learned from this vulnerability.