Improper AuthenticationWeakness · CWE-287

CVE-2025-27403

HIGH · 7.2 CVSS v4.0 Published 2025-03-11
Patch available
A vendor patch is available. No clean upgrade release — apply the published patch.
See remediation →
79/100
Remediation priority · High
Remotely reachable No privileges Patch available

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
Ratify is a verification engine as a binary executable and on Kubernetes which enables verification of artifact security metadata and admits for deployment only those that comply with policies the user creates. In a Kubernetes environment, Ratify can be configured to authenticate to a private Azure Container Registry (ACR). The Azure workload identity and Azure managed identity authentication providers are configured in this setup. Users that configure a private ACR to be used with the Azure authentication providers may be impacted by a vulnerability that exists in versions prior to 1.2.3 and 1.3.2. Both Azure authentication providers attempt to exchange an Entra ID (EID) token for an ACR refresh token. However, Ratify’s Azure authentication providers did not verify that the target registry is an ACR. This could have led to the EID token being presented to a non-ACR registry during token exchange. EID tokens with ACR access can potentially be extracted and abused if a user workload contains an image reference to a malicious registry. As of versions 1.2.3 and 1.3.2, the Azure workload identity and Azure managed identity authentication providers are updated to add new validation prior to EID token exchange. Validation relies upon registry domain validation against a pre-configured list of well-known ACR endpoints. EID token exchange will be executed only if at least one of the configured well-known domain suffixes (wildcard support included) matches the registry domain of the image reference.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-287

The mechanism that verifies who a user is can be side-stepped or fooled, letting an attacker act as someone they're not. Everything built on top of that identity then becomes untrustworthy. Fixing it means hardening the full authentication flow, including edge cases, tokens, and secondary paths.

General guidance for the improper authentication class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
Authentication
X
User interaction
P
Scope
X

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:P/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:L/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Patch available Apply the vendor patch
Vendor patch github.com →
Recommended fix High confidence

Upgrade to Ratify version 1.2.3 or 1.3.2 (or later) - choose the appropriate release train based on your current version

  1. Identify the current version of Ratify in use by checking the deployment manifests or Helm chart values
  2. Upgrade to version 1.2.3 (if using the 1.2.x release train) or version 1.3.2 or later (if using the 1.3.x release train)
  3. If using Helm, update the chart version: helm upgrade <release-name> ratify-charts/ratify --set image.tag=<fixed version>
  4. If using direct manifests, update the container image tag in deployment YAML to the fixed version (e.g., ghcr.io/ratify-project/ratify:v1.3.2)
  5. Apply the updated configuration: kubectl apply -f <updated-manifest>.yaml
  6. Verify the new pods start successfully: kubectl get pods -l app=ratify
  7. Test that authentication to Azure Container Registry still functions correctly with the configured Azure workload identity or managed identity
Caveat The upgrade adds validation for ACR registry domains before token exchange; ensure any custom registry configurations are compatible with the new domain validation logic

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

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