CVE-2026-18573
Description
A flaw was found in the keycloak-services component of Keycloak, which is used for managing authentication and authorization flows. The issue occurs when a realm administrator configures client policies to enforce specific authentication requirements on confidential clients. Due to improper evaluation of the client state during an update operation, an attacker with client management permissions can bypass these security policies by first creating a public client and then updating it to a confidential client with weaker authentication. This can result in the persistence of clients that do not comply with the intended security hardening of the realm.
Statement
The Red Hat Product Security team has assessed the severity of this vulnerability as Moderate, given that exploitation requires existing client management privileges or a dynamic registration token. Successful exploitation allows an attacker to bypass realm-specific client policy conditions and persist confidential clients with weaker authentication than required by policy. The vulnerability's root cause is the evaluation of update operations against the previous client state rather than the proposed new state.
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).
The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 6.5 | N/A | 6.5 |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | Low | N/A | Low |
| 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:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Confidentiality
Technical Impact: Read Application Data; Read Files or Directories
An attacker could read sensitive data, either by reading the data directly from a data store that is not restricted, or by accessing insufficiently-protected, privileged functionality to read the data.
Integrity
Technical Impact: Modify Application Data; Modify Files or Directories
An attacker could modify sensitive data, either by writing the data directly to a data store that is not restricted, or by accessing insufficiently-protected, privileged functionality to write the data.
Access Control
Technical Impact: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity; Bypass Protection Mechanism
An attacker could gain privileges by modifying or reading critical data directly, or by accessing privileged functionality.
Availability
Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory); DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
An attacker could gain unauthorized access to resources on the system and excessively consume those resources, leading to a denial of service.
Acknowledgements
Red Hat would like to thank Paul Bottinelli (Trail of Bits) for reporting this issue.
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