CVE-2024-10270 is a vulnerability identified in the Keycloak-services package, specifically affecting versions from 0 up to 25.0.0. The root cause is an inefficient regular expression (regex) implementation in the SearchQueryUtils method. When this method processes untrusted input, the regex complexity can cause excessive CPU and memory consumption, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition by exhausting system resources. This type of vulnerability is often referred to as a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The vulnerability can be triggered remotely over the network (AV:N) with low attack complexity (AC:L) and requires only low privileges (PR:L), but no user interaction (UI:N). The scope of the impact remains unchanged (S:U), and the vulnerability affects availability (A:H) without compromising confidentiality or integrity. Although no known exploits have been reported in the wild, the nature of the vulnerability makes it a potential target for attackers aiming to disrupt services. Keycloak is widely used for identity and access management in enterprise and government environments, making this vulnerability relevant for organizations relying on it for authentication and authorization services. The vulnerability was published on November 25, 2024, and is tracked under CVE-2024-10270 with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.5, categorized as medium severity. The vulnerability was assigned by Red Hat and is currently published without an available patch link, indicating that remediation may require monitoring vendor updates or applying custom mitigations.

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2024-10270 is the potential disruption of identity and access management services provided by Keycloak. A successful exploitation could lead to denial of service conditions, causing authentication failures, service outages, and operational disruptions. This can affect business continuity, especially for organizations that rely heavily on Keycloak for single sign-on (SSO) and access control across multiple applications. The lack of confidentiality or integrity impact means data breaches or unauthorized data modifications are unlikely from this vulnerability alone. However, service unavailability can indirectly affect compliance with regulations such as GDPR if it impedes users' access to critical services or delays incident response. The medium severity score reflects the balance between the ease of exploitation and the limited scope of impact. Organizations with high availability requirements or those in sectors like finance, healthcare, and government should prioritize mitigation to avoid operational risks.

1. Monitor Keycloak vendor advisories and apply official patches or updates as soon as they become available to address CVE-2024-10270. 2. Implement input validation and sanitization on all inputs passed to SearchQueryUtils or related regex processing functions to limit or reject potentially malicious or overly complex regex patterns. 3. Employ runtime resource monitoring and alerting to detect unusual CPU or memory usage spikes indicative of a ReDoS attack. 4. Consider deploying Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) or API gateways with regex complexity limits or rate limiting to reduce exposure to malicious queries. 5. Restrict access to Keycloak administrative and API endpoints to trusted networks and authenticated users with minimal privileges. 6. Conduct regular security testing, including fuzzing and regex complexity analysis, on custom Keycloak extensions or integrations. 7. Prepare incident response plans to quickly mitigate DoS conditions, including failover or service degradation strategies. 8. Educate developers and administrators about the risks of untrusted input in regex operations and best practices for secure coding in identity management contexts.