It was found that the org.picketlink.common.util.DocumentUtil.getDocumentBuilderFactory() method implementation provided a DocumentBuilderFactory that will expand entity references. This could be used by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to read files accessible to the user running the application server, and potentially perform other more advanced XXE attacks.

It was discovered that the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) implementation did not sufficiently verify all authorization conditions required by the Maintainer role to perform certain administrative actions. An authenticated user with the Maintainer role can use this flaw to add, modify or undefine a limited set of attributes and their values which otherwise cannot be written to.