OpenStack Keystone's federated token rescoping mechanism doesn't propagate the original token's expiry to the newly issued tokenGHSA-whqr-fgm5-x77q
MEDIUMGHSA-whqr-fgm5-x77q is a medium-severity (CVSS 6) CWE-863 vulnerability in keystone. A fix is available for keystone — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-whqr-fgm5-x77q.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-whqr-fgm5-x77q by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 384,993 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
keystone🐍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 29.0.2. The Keystone federated token rescoping mechanism does not propagate the original token's expiry to the newly issued token. When a federated user rescopes a token via POST /v3/auth/tokens, the handle_scoped_token() function in the mapped authentication plugin returns response data without an expires_at value. The token provider falls back to issuing a token with a fresh default TTL. By rescoping repeatedly before each token expires, a user can maintain access indefinitely, bypassing operator-configured token lifetime policies. This is a variant of CVE-2012-3426. Only deployments using federated identity (SAML2, OpenID Connect) are affected.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | keystone | ≥ 14.0.0&&< 27.0.2 | 27.0.2pip install --upgrade 'keystone==27.0.2' |
| 🐍PyPI | keystone | ≥ 28.0.0&&< 28.0.2 | 28.0.2pip install --upgrade 'keystone==28.0.2' |
| 🐍PyPI | keystone | ≥ 29.0.0&&< 29.0.2 | 29.0.2pip install --upgrade 'keystone==29.0.2' |
Affected Products
keystoneopenstackDetection & 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 27.0.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-whqr-fgm5-x77q is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Put an independent control in front of the weakness: restrict the affected endpoint or interface to trusted networks, require an additional authentication factor or proxy-level check, and invalidate existing sessions and credentials in case the flaw has already been used.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-whqr-fgm5-x77q in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.