Privilege escalation and a certificate-validation flaw allow cross-account database access (Azure PostgreSQL "ExtraReplica", 2022)
Researchers exploited a bug in Azure's modified PostgreSQL engine to gain superuser privileges and run operating-system commands on their own database instance.
What happened
- A flaw in certificate validation let them forge a client certificate matching another customer's instance and access other customers' databases across accounts.Wiz Research discovers "ExtraReplica": a cross-account database vulnerability in Azure PostgreSQL
The failure pattern
Watch the pattern: Cross-tenant access through a caller-controlled identifier
Safeguards that address it
CollectSEA's engineering analysis of what would have prevented or contained this failure.
- Validate tenant identity with strict, anchored certificate checksMatch the full identity of a client certificate rather than a loosely matched pattern, and fuzz identity parsing.
- Isolate tenant containers from host networkingGive each tenant workload its own network namespace and do not grant superuser to customer-controlled roles.
Related standards
CollectSEA's mapping through this incident's failure pattern; not an official determination by the standards bodies.
- ASI03 Identity and Privilege Abuse
- LLM03 Excessive Agency
- AC-3 Access Enforcement
- AC-4 Information Flow Enforcement
- AC-5 Separation of Duties
- AC-6 Least Privilege
- RV.3.4 Update the development process
- MAP 5.1 Estimate impacts from past uses and public incident reports
- Goal 3 Reducing entire classes of vulnerability
- CWE-862 Missing Authorization
- CWE-639 Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key
Building something similar?
Describe your design and see every precedent that applies, with safeguards you can hand to your coding agent.
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