CVE-2020-12689 — keystone
HIGHCVE-2020-12689 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in keystone. A fix is available for keystone — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OpenStack Keystone EC2 and/or credential endpoints are not protected from a scoped context
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-12689 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,333 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
keystone🐍keystoneReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
An issue was discovered in OpenStack Keystone before 15.0.1, and 16.0.0. Any user authenticated within a limited scope (trust/oauth/application credential) can create an EC2 credential with an escalated permission, such as obtaining admin while the user is on a limited viewer role. This potentially allows a malicious user to act as the admin on a project another user has the admin role on, which can effectively grant that user global admin privileges.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | keystone | all versions | 15.0.1pip install --upgrade 'keystone==15.0.1' |
| 🐍PyPI | keystone | ≥ 16.0.0&&< 16.0.1 | 16.0.1pip install --upgrade 'keystone==16.0.1' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for keystone, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update keystone to 15.0.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2020-12689 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2020-12689 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2020-12689. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Red Hat Quay includes keystone-client, which is not vulnerable to this (server-side) vulnerability.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10.0 (Newton) | openstack-keystone-1:10.0.3-8.el7ost | RHSA-2020:3096 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13.0 (Queens) | openstack-keystone-1:13.0.4-3.el7ost | RHSA-2020:2732 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15.0 (Stein) | openstack-keystone-1:15.0.1-0.20200512110437.95b2bbe.el8ost | RHSA-2020:3102 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.0 (Train) | openstack-keystone-1:16.0.1-0.20200511063421.40cbb7b.el8ost | RHSA-2020:3105 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-12689 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2020-12689 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.