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Argo CD will blindly trust JWT claims if anonymous access is enabled

Critical severity GitHub Reviewed Published May 18, 2022 in argoproj/argo-cd • Updated Jan 27, 2023

Package

gomod github.com/argoproj/argo-cd (Go)

Affected versions

<= 1.8.7

Patched versions

2.1.15
gomod github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/v2 (Go)
>= 2.3.0, < 2.3.4
>= 2.2.0, < 2.2.9
< 2.1.15
2.3.4
2.2.9
2.1.15

Description

Impact

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Argo CD which would allow unauthenticated users to impersonate as any Argo CD user or role, including the admin user, by sending a specifically crafted JSON Web Token (JWT) along with the request. In order for this vulnerability to be exploited, anonymous access to the Argo CD instance must have been enabled.

In a default Argo CD installation, anonymous access is disabled. To find out if anonymous access is enabled in your instance, please see the Workarounds section of this advisory below.

The vulnerability can be exploited to impersonate as any user or role, including the built-in admin account regardless of whether that account is enabled or disabled. Also, the attacker does not need an account on the Argo CD instance in order to exploit this.

If anonymous access to the instance is enabled, an attacker can:

  • Escalate their privileges, effectively allowing them to gain the same privileges on the cluster as the Argo CD instance, which is cluster admin in a default installation. This will allow the attacker to create, manipulate and delete any resource on the cluster.

  • Exfiltrate data by deploying malicious workloads with elevated privileges, thus bypassing any redaction of sensitive data otherwise enforced by the Argo CD API

We strongly recommend that all users of Argo CD update to a version containing this patch as soon as possible, regardless of whether or not anonymous access is enabled in your instance.

Please see below for a list of versions containing a fix for this vulnerability and any possible workarounds existing for this issue.

Patches

A patch for this vulnerability has been released in the following Argo CD versions:

  • v2.3.4
  • v2.2.9
  • v2.1.15

Workarounds

Disable anonymous access

If you are not able to upgrade to a patched version quickly, we highly suggest disabling anonymous access if it is enabled.

To find out whether anonymous access is enabled for your Argo CD instance, you can query the argocd-cm ConfigMap in the Argo CD's installation namespace. The below example assumes you have installed Argo CD to the argocd namespace:

$ kubectl get -n argocd cm argocd-cm -o jsonpath='{.data.users\.anonymous\.enabled}'

If the result of this command is either empty or "false", anonymous access to that instance is not enabled. If the result is "true", your instance is vulnerable.

To disable anonymous access, patch the argocd-cm ConfigMap to either remove the users.anonymous.enabled field or set this field to "false".

To set the field to "false":

$ kubectl patch -n argocd cm argocd-cm --type=json -p='[{"op":"add", "path":"/data/users.anonymous.enabled", "value":"false"}]'

Or you can remove the field completely, thus disabling anonymous access because the default is false:

$ kubectl patch -n argocd cm argocd-cm --type=json -p='[{"op":"remove", "path":"/data/users.anonymous.enabled"}]'

Credits

The Argo CD team would like to thank Mark Pim and Andrzej Hajto, who discovered this vulnerability and reported it in a responsible way to us.

For more information

References

@jannfis jannfis published to argoproj/argo-cd May 18, 2022
Published by the National Vulnerability Database May 20, 2022
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database May 24, 2022
Reviewed May 24, 2022
Last updated Jan 27, 2023

Severity

Critical

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Changed
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS score

0.599%
(79th percentile)

CVE ID

CVE-2022-29165

GHSA ID

GHSA-r642-gv9p-2wjj

Source code

github.com/argoproj/argo-cd
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