CVE-2025-49827 is a critical vulnerability affecting CyberArk's Conjur secrets management products, specifically Conjur OSS versions 1.19.5 through 1.22.0 and Secrets Manager, Self-Hosted versions 13.1 through 13.5 and 13.6 (prior to 13.5.1 and 13.6.1). The flaw arises from improper validation of authentication requests in the IAM authenticator component. An attacker capable of manipulating AWS-signed headers can exploit a malformed regular expression used by the Secrets Manager to validate authentication requests. This manipulation allows the attacker to redirect the authentication validation request to a malicious server under their control. By doing so, the attacker can bypass the IAM authenticator, effectively impersonating a legitimate client. This grants the attacker the permissions associated with the compromised client, potentially exposing sensitive secrets and credentials managed by Conjur. The vulnerability is rooted in CWE-807, which involves reliance on untrusted inputs in security decisions, highlighting a failure to properly validate or sanitize inputs before making critical authentication decisions. The vulnerability has a CVSS 4.0 score of 9.1 (critical), reflecting its network attack vector, low complexity, no required privileges or user interaction, and high impact on confidentiality and integrity. Although no known exploits are reported in the wild yet, the severity and nature of the flaw make it a significant risk for organizations relying on Conjur for secrets management. Fixed versions have been released: Conjur OSS 1.22.1 and Secrets Manager, Self-Hosted 13.5.1 and 13.6.1 address this issue by correcting the validation logic to prevent redirection and bypass.

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a severe risk to the confidentiality and integrity of critical infrastructure secrets and credentials. Conjur is widely used in enterprise environments to securely manage secrets for cloud infrastructure, applications, and automation pipelines. Exploitation could allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to sensitive systems, escalate privileges, and move laterally within networks. This could lead to data breaches, disruption of services, and compromise of compliance with regulations such as GDPR due to unauthorized data access. The ability to bypass IAM authentication without user interaction or privileges makes this vulnerability particularly dangerous in automated and cloud-native environments prevalent in Europe. Organizations using vulnerable versions of Conjur risk exposure of secrets that protect cloud resources, databases, and internal services, potentially enabling further attacks such as ransomware or espionage. The lack of known exploits in the wild currently provides a window for mitigation, but the critical severity demands immediate attention to prevent future exploitation.

European organizations should immediately identify and inventory all deployments of Conjur OSS and Secrets Manager, Self-Hosted to determine if they are running vulnerable versions. The primary mitigation is to upgrade to the patched versions: Conjur OSS 1.22.1 or later, and Secrets Manager, Self-Hosted 13.5.1 or 13.6.1 or later. Until upgrades can be applied, organizations should restrict network access to the IAM authenticator endpoints to trusted sources only, implement strict egress filtering to prevent redirection to unauthorized external servers, and monitor authentication logs for anomalous requests or unexpected redirection attempts. Additionally, review and harden AWS IAM policies and credentials used by Conjur to minimize the impact of potential compromise. Employ runtime application self-protection (RASP) or web application firewalls (WAF) with rules to detect and block suspicious header manipulations. Finally, conduct thorough security assessments and penetration tests focusing on authentication flows to ensure no other bypasses exist.