CVE-2025-47713 is a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Apache CloudStack versions 4.10.0.0 through 4.20.0.0. The flaw arises from improper privilege management (CWE-269) where a malicious Domain Admin user within the ROOT domain can reset passwords of user accounts holding the Admin role type without sufficient restrictions. This vulnerability allows the attacker to escalate privileges by assuming control over higher-privileged Admin accounts. Consequently, the attacker can impersonate these Admin users and gain unauthorized access to sensitive APIs and resources managed by CloudStack. The potential consequences include compromise of resource integrity and confidentiality, data loss, denial of service, and disruption of the availability of cloud infrastructure. The vulnerability is exploitable remotely (network vector) with low attack complexity and requires privileges at the Domain Admin level but no user interaction. The Apache Software Foundation has addressed this issue in versions 4.19.3.0 and 4.20.1.0 by implementing strict validation on role hierarchy, ensuring the caller’s role is equal or higher than the target’s, enforcing API privilege comparisons, and introducing two domain-level settings to control operations on accounts of the same role type and within the same account. These mitigations prevent unauthorized privilege escalation by restricting which roles can operate on others and under what conditions.

For European organizations using Apache CloudStack, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to cloud infrastructure security. Attackers with Domain Admin privileges could escalate to Admin roles, gaining broad control over cloud resources, potentially leading to unauthorized data access, manipulation, or deletion. This could disrupt critical services, cause data breaches involving sensitive or regulated information (e.g., GDPR-protected data), and lead to operational downtime. The integrity and availability of cloud-managed services could be severely impacted, affecting business continuity. Given the widespread use of Apache CloudStack in private and public clouds across Europe, especially in sectors like finance, government, and telecommunications, exploitation could have cascading effects on dependent services and customers. Although no known exploits are reported in the wild yet, the high CVSS score (8.8) and ease of exploitation by privileged insiders or compromised accounts underscore the urgency for remediation.

European organizations should immediately assess their Apache CloudStack deployments to identify affected versions (4.10.0.0 through 4.20.0.0). The primary mitigation is to upgrade to Apache CloudStack versions 4.19.3.0 or 4.20.1.0, which contain the official fixes. Until upgrades can be applied, organizations should: 1) Restrict Domain Admin privileges strictly to trusted personnel and implement strong monitoring and auditing of privileged account activities. 2) Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all administrative accounts to reduce the risk of credential compromise. 3) Utilize CloudStack’s domain-level settings to limit operations on accounts of the same role type and within the same account, tailoring these settings to minimize privilege overlap. 4) Monitor API calls and password reset operations for anomalous behavior indicative of privilege escalation attempts. 5) Conduct regular security reviews and penetration testing focused on privilege management controls within CloudStack environments. 6) Implement network segmentation and least privilege principles to limit the blast radius if an account is compromised.