What is CVE-2023-23612?

CVE-2023-23612 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Amazon Opensearch, classified under Improper Authentication. CVSS score: 4.7/10. Published 2023-01-26.

How severe is CVE-2023-23612?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.7 out of 10.

Auth bypass in Amazon Opensearch

CVE-2023-23612

OpenSearch is an open source distributed and RESTful search engine. OpenSearch uses JWTs to store role claims obtained from the Identity Provider (IdP) when the authentication backend is SAML or OpenID Connect. There is an issue in how those claims are processed from the JWTs where the leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed, allowing users to potentially claim roles they are not assigned to if any role matches the whitespace-stripped version of the roles they are a member of. This issue is only present for authenticated users, and it requires either the existence of roles that match, not considering leading/trailing whitespace, or the ability for users to create said matching roles. In addition, the Identity Provider must allow leading and trailing spaces in role names. OpenSearch 1.0.0-1.3.7 and 2.0.0-2.4.1 are affected. Users are advised to upgrade to OpenSearch 1.3.8 or 2.5.0. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

Vulnerability class: Broken Authentication

Published 2023-01-26 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 4.7 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.008 (54.7th percentile), scored 2026-09-27.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 55th percentile — 54.7% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.008 · newest: 0.008 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Amazon Opensearch
Opensearch-Project Security — versions >= 2.0.0, < 2.5.0, < 1.3.8

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-287 — Improper Authentication

References

github.com/opensearch-project/security/security/advisories/GHSA-864v-6qj7-62qj (Third Party Advisory)
github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/releases/tag/2.5.0 (Third Party Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2023-23612?: CVE-2023-23612 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Amazon Opensearch, classified under Improper Authentication. CVSS score: 4.7/10. Published 2023-01-26.
How severe is CVE-2023-23612?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.7 out of 10.