CVE-2025-22854 is a medium-severity vulnerability affecting Ping Identity's PingFederate product, specifically version 1.0.1 of the PingFederate Google Adapter. The root cause is improper handling of non-200 HTTP responses, which leads to thread exhaustion under normal usage conditions. This vulnerability is classified under CWE-394, which relates to unexpected status codes or return values. When the adapter receives HTTP responses other than the expected 200 OK, it fails to properly manage the threads handling these responses. As a result, threads remain occupied or blocked, eventually exhausting the thread pool available to the application. This exhaustion can degrade the service's availability, potentially causing denial of service (DoS) conditions. The CVSS 4.0 vector indicates that the vulnerability can be exploited remotely (AV:N) with low attack complexity (AC:L), but requires privileges (PR:L), user interaction (UI:P), and authentication (AU:Y). The impact on confidentiality and integrity is none, but availability is high (VA:H). The scope is partial (S:P), meaning the vulnerability affects components beyond the vulnerable component but within the same security scope. Exploitation requires an authenticated user to interact with the system, which somewhat limits the attack surface. No known exploits are currently in the wild, and no patches have been published yet. The vulnerability was reserved in January 2025 and published in June 2025. Given the nature of the vulnerability, it primarily threatens service availability by causing resource exhaustion, which can disrupt authentication flows relying on PingFederate's Google Adapter integration.

For European organizations, especially those relying on PingFederate for identity federation and single sign-on (SSO) services, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to service availability. Organizations using the Google Adapter component in PingFederate version 1.0.1 may experience thread exhaustion leading to denial of service, disrupting user authentication and access management workflows. This can impact business continuity, especially for enterprises with critical reliance on cloud-based or hybrid identity solutions. The disruption could affect internal users and customers, potentially causing operational delays and reputational damage. Since the vulnerability requires authenticated user interaction, insider threats or compromised user accounts could be leveraged to trigger the exhaustion. Industries with stringent uptime requirements, such as finance, healthcare, and government, may face heightened risks. Additionally, the partial scope impact means that other components within the same security boundary could be indirectly affected, amplifying the disruption. The absence of known exploits reduces immediate risk, but the medium CVSS score and the nature of the vulnerability warrant proactive mitigation to prevent potential exploitation.

Implement strict monitoring of thread pool usage and HTTP response codes within the PingFederate Google Adapter to detect abnormal thread consumption early. Configure rate limiting on authenticated user requests to the Google Adapter to reduce the risk of thread exhaustion from repeated non-200 responses. Enforce robust authentication and session management controls to minimize the risk of compromised accounts being used to exploit this vulnerability. Isolate the PingFederate Google Adapter component in a dedicated environment or container to limit the blast radius of thread exhaustion. Apply input validation and error handling improvements in custom integrations or scripts interacting with the Google Adapter to gracefully handle non-200 HTTP responses. Engage with Ping Identity support to obtain any available patches or workarounds, and plan for timely updates once patches are released. Conduct regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments focused on authentication components to identify similar resource exhaustion risks. Prepare incident response plans specifically addressing denial of service scenarios affecting identity federation services.