CVE-2025-5988 is a medium-severity vulnerability affecting the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 for RHEL 8, specifically within the aap-gateway component. The flaw involves a lack of proper Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) origin checking on requests that the gateway sends to external components such as the controller, hub, and event-driven automation (eda) modules. CSRF vulnerabilities allow an attacker to trick an authenticated user’s browser into sending unauthorized commands to a web application, potentially causing unintended actions without the user’s consent. In this case, the absence of CSRF origin validation means that malicious web pages or scripts could induce the gateway to perform actions on connected components without proper verification. The CVSS v3.1 score is 5.3, reflecting a medium severity level, with the vector indicating network attack vector (AV:N), high attack complexity (AC:H), low privileges required (PR:L), no user interaction needed (UI:N), unchanged scope (S:U), high confidentiality impact (C:H), no integrity impact (I:N), and no availability impact (A:N). This suggests that while exploitation requires some conditions (high complexity and low privileges), successful exploitation could lead to significant confidentiality breaches, such as unauthorized data disclosure from the controller, hub, or eda components. No known exploits are currently reported in the wild, and no patches or mitigations are linked yet, indicating this is a recently disclosed issue. The vulnerability is particularly relevant for organizations using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 on RHEL 8, which is widely used for IT automation and orchestration in enterprise environments.

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a risk primarily to the confidentiality of sensitive automation workflows and data managed by the Ansible Automation Platform. Since Ansible is often used to automate critical infrastructure, configuration management, and deployment pipelines, unauthorized commands triggered via CSRF could expose confidential configuration data, credentials, or operational details to attackers. This could lead to indirect impacts such as enabling further attacks or espionage. Although the vulnerability does not directly affect integrity or availability, the confidentiality breach alone could undermine trust in automation processes and compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR. Organizations in sectors with stringent security requirements—such as finance, healthcare, government, and critical infrastructure—are particularly at risk. The lack of user interaction needed for exploitation increases the threat surface, especially if attackers can lure authenticated users to malicious sites. However, the high attack complexity and requirement for low privileges limit the ease of exploitation, somewhat mitigating immediate widespread risk.

To mitigate CVE-2025-5988, European organizations should implement the following specific measures: 1) Immediately monitor Red Hat and Ansible Automation Platform advisories for official patches or updates addressing this CSRF flaw and apply them promptly. 2) Restrict access to the aap-gateway and associated components using network segmentation and firewall rules to limit exposure to trusted networks and users only. 3) Employ web application firewalls (WAFs) with custom rules to detect and block suspicious cross-origin requests targeting the gateway. 4) Review and harden authentication and authorization policies, ensuring minimal privileges are granted to users and services interacting with the gateway. 5) Implement strict Content Security Policy (CSP) headers and SameSite cookie attributes to reduce the risk of CSRF attacks via browsers. 6) Conduct internal security assessments and penetration tests focusing on the gateway’s request handling to identify any additional weaknesses. 7) Educate users about the risks of visiting untrusted websites while authenticated to critical automation platforms. These targeted actions go beyond generic advice by focusing on network-level controls, application-layer protections, and user awareness tailored to the Ansible Automation Platform environment.