CVE-2026-16072
Description
A flaw was found in the organization management component of Keycloak. A delegated administrator with permission to manage organizations can create an invitation for a non-existent email address and then retrieve the secret registration link directly through the application programming interface. By using this link, the administrator can create new user accounts and add them to the organization without having the required user management permissions or access to the invited email account. This allows an administrator to bypass security boundaries and add unauthorized members to an organization.
Statement
The Red Hat Product Security team has assessed the severity of this vulnerability as Moderate, given that exploitation requires the attacker to already possess high-level administrative privileges (manage-organizations). Successful exploitation allows an attacker to bypass the manage-users permission boundary to create new managed user accounts and add them to an organization without mailbox verification. The vulnerability's root cause is the unintended exposure of the registration bearer link in the REST API response for pending invitations.
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).
The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 4.9 | N/A | 4.9 |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | High | N/A | High |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | None | N/A | None |
| Integrity Impact | High | N/A | High |
| Availability Impact | None | N/A | None |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Acknowledgements
Red Hat would like to thank Paul Bottinelli (Trail of Bits) for reporting this issue.
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