CVE-2025-9909
Description
A flaw was found in the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Gateway route creation component. This vulnerability allows credential theft via the creation of misleading routes using a double-slash (//) prefix in the gateway_path. A malicious or socially engineered administrator can configure a honey-pot route to intercept and exfiltrate user credentials, potentially maintaining persistent access or creating a backdoor even after their permissions are revoked.
Statement
This issue is classified as Moderate because exploitation requires the attacker to have administrative access (or successfully social engineer a legitimate admin). A malicious or tricked admin can create a deceptive route with a double-slash path that captures user credentials in cleartext, potentially allowing persistent backdoor access even after the admin’s permissions are revoked. The gateway does not normalize or validate these paths, meaning normal users cannot detect the attack through ordinary API use. Although an attacker cannot exploit this without access to route creation, the combination of privileged requirements and complete credential exposure makes this a moderate severity risk in any environment where multiple users rely on gateway authentication.
Mitigation
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 6.7 | N/A | N/A |
| Attack Vector | Local | N/A | N/A |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | N/A |
| Privileges Required | High | N/A | N/A |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | N/A |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | N/A |
| Confidentiality | High | N/A | N/A |
| Integrity Impact | High | N/A | N/A |
| Availability Impact | High | N/A | N/A |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Access Control
Technical Impact: Bypass Protection Mechanism
An attacker may be able to bypass the authorization mechanism to gain access to the otherwise-protected URL.
Confidentiality
Technical Impact: Read Files or Directories
If a non-canonical URL is used, the server may choose to return the contents of the file, instead of pre-processing the file (e.g. as a program).
Acknowledgements
This issue was discovered by Elijah DeLee (Red Hat).
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