CVE-2025-25010 is a medium-severity vulnerability affecting Elastic Kibana versions 9.0.0 and 9.1.0. The issue stems from incorrect authorization controls related to the built-in reporting_user role. Specifically, this role is granted unintended access privileges that allow it to access all Kibana Spaces, which are logical partitions within Kibana used to segregate dashboards, visualizations, and other saved objects. This misconfiguration leads to a privilege escalation scenario where a user assigned the reporting_user role can access data and resources beyond their intended scope. The vulnerability is classified under CWE-863 (Incorrect Authorization), indicating that the system fails to properly enforce access control policies. The CVSS v3.1 base score is 6.5, reflecting a medium severity level. The vector indicates that the attack can be performed remotely (AV:N) with low attack complexity (AC:L), requires privileges (PR:L) but no user interaction (UI:N), and impacts confidentiality (C:H) without affecting integrity or availability. No known exploits are currently reported in the wild, and no patches have been linked yet, suggesting that mitigation may require configuration changes or awaiting vendor updates. This vulnerability could allow an attacker with limited privileges to gain unauthorized visibility into all Kibana Spaces, potentially exposing sensitive business intelligence data or operational dashboards that should be restricted. Given Kibana's role as a visualization and analytics platform for Elasticsearch data, unauthorized access could lead to significant information disclosure risks.

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to data confidentiality within Elastic Stack deployments. Kibana is widely used across industries such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and government for monitoring, analytics, and reporting. Unauthorized access to all Kibana Spaces could expose sensitive operational data, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property. This could lead to regulatory non-compliance under GDPR, resulting in legal penalties and reputational damage. Additionally, attackers could leverage the exposed data to facilitate further attacks or insider threats. Since the vulnerability requires an attacker to have some level of privileges (reporting_user role), insider threats or compromised accounts pose a particular concern. The lack of impact on integrity and availability reduces the risk of data tampering or service disruption but does not mitigate the confidentiality breach risk. Organizations relying heavily on Kibana for critical dashboards and reports should consider this vulnerability a priority to address to maintain trust and compliance.

Immediate mitigation steps include auditing and restricting assignment of the reporting_user role to only trusted users, minimizing the number of accounts with this role. Organizations should implement strict role-based access control (RBAC) policies and regularly review user permissions within Kibana. Network segmentation and monitoring of Kibana access logs can help detect anomalous access patterns. Until an official patch is released, consider disabling or limiting the use of reporting features that rely on the reporting_user role if feasible. Employ multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users with elevated privileges to reduce the risk of account compromise. Additionally, organizations should stay informed about Elastic's security advisories for patches or configuration guidance addressing this vulnerability. Testing updates in a staging environment before deployment is recommended to avoid service disruptions. Finally, integrating Kibana access monitoring into a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system can enhance detection of suspicious activities related to privilege escalation attempts.