Vulnerability Database

363,159

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2026-45052 — org.openidentityplatform.openam / openam-federation-library

Improper Authorization

Summary

Description

An Improper Authorization (CWE-285) issue in OpenAM's Liberty Web Services SOAP receiver allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to write persistent entries into the Liberty Discovery store on any user's LDAP entry, and into a shared root-realm Discovery branch. This impacts OpenAM Community Edition through version 16.0.6. This issue was patched in version 16.1.1.

Liberty ID-WSF is a legacy protocol superseded by SAML 2.0, OAuth, and OIDC, and deployments that intentionally leverage it assume the risks of an unmaintained federation stack. While Liberty is exposed in the shipped defaults, this bug does not require active Liberty consumers for the write itself. Downstream impact depends on whether anything consumes Discovery data. The endpoint accepts anonymous writes that are performed server-side by the Discovery handlers, bypassing the requester's LDAP and identity ACLs. The global Discovery path explicitly uses the internal admin token.

Impact

OpenAM Community Edition deployments through version 16.0.6 that expose the Liberty Web Services component are potentially affected. An unauthenticated attacker who can reach the relevant endpoint may write persistent records to the discovery store, bypassing normal identity-layer access controls.

These writes are performed with elevated internal privileges server-side. In deployments that actively consume Liberty discovery data, manipulated records could influence service routing or security mechanism selection in subsequent requests. The severity of downstream impact varies by deployment..

Patch

This has been patched in OpenAM Community Edition version 16.1.1. Users are encouraged to update to the latest release.

No technical information available.

Frequently Asked Questions

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.