389-ds-base security assessment finding 021 (2026-04-22).

Pre-auth LDAP filter injection in CleanAllRUV status-check extop (OID 2.16.840.1.113730.3.6.8). Handler multisupplierextopcleanruvcheckstatus() in replextop.c passes attacker-supplied filter unsanitized to internal cn=config search with replication plugin identity. No auth checks (unlike other replication extops).

With default nsslapd-allow-anonymous-access: on, anonymous bind suffices. Boolean oracle extracts 31 cn=config attributes (replication bind DN, password storage scheme, paths, ACI keywords). Password hashes not extractable via substring.

PoC confirmed: RHEL 7 (389-ds-base-1.3.11.1-5.el79), Fedora 42 (389-ds-base-3.1.4-6.fc42).

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N (7.5). Red Hat impact: Moderate. CWE-90, CWE-306, CWE-20.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The dereference control plugin does not check for allocation failure before using a BER structure, allowing an unauthenticated remote attacker to crash the LDAP server when the system is under memory pressure.

A flaw was found in 389-ds-base. The getldapmessagecontrolsext() function in the LDAP server does not enforce an upper bound on the number of controls per LDAP message. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can send a specially crafted LDAP request containing hundreds of thousands of minimal controls within the default maximum BER message size (2 MB), causing excessive CPU consumption and heap allocation on the server. Under concurrent exploitation, this leads to significant latency degradation, worker thread starvation, or out-of-memory termination, resulting in a denial of service.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server (389-ds-base). In idssaslcheckbind(), on a successful SASLOK from the underlying Cyrus SASL library, the connection is marked SASL-complete and bind credentials are installed via bindcredentialssetnolock() before the account-lock check (slapicheckaccountlock()) is performed for non-root binds. If the subsequent lock check determines the account is locked (nsAccountLock: true), the bind is failed and reported to the client, but the already-installed SASL-complete flag and bind credentials are not reverted. A client that already knows the correct password for an account that has since been administratively locked can bind via SASL PLAIN, receive an "account locked" failure response, and continue using the same, already-authenticated TCP connection to perform further LDAP operations as that account -- defeating account lock as an access-revocation control. Setting nsslapd-close-on-failed-bind does not mitigate this. This finding was independently reported by two unrelated parties (OpenAI Security Research and Andrew Rukin of Arenadata) who converged on the identical root cause.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The ldaputf8prev() function reads bytes before the start of a buffer without bounds checking, causing a heap buffer over-read in string filter parsing that may influence internal filter processing behavior.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The Content Synchronization persistent search plugin allows unbounded memory growth when an authenticated client stops reading sync responses, enabling denial of service. Additional race conditions in plugin thread lifecycle can cause crashes during connection teardown or shutdown.

A heap-buffer-overflow flaw was found in 389 Directory Server (389-ds-base). When normalizing a Distinguished Name (DN) that contains a legacy-quoted value encoding a multivalued nested Relative Distinguished Name (RDN), the server can write past the end of a heap allocation while sorting RDN attribute-value pairs. An unauthenticated remote attacker can trigger this condition by sending an LDAP operation whose DN reaches the DN normalization routine, such as a search with a crafted base DN. This can corrupt heap memory and may cause denial of service.

A flaw was found in 389-ds-base where the LDBM backend attribute encryption uses a hardcoded static initialization vector for AES-CBC and 3DES-CBC operations, allowing an attacker with privileged filesystem access to detect plaintext equality across encrypted entries by comparing ciphertext blocks.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The PBKDF2-SHA256 password verification function pbkdf2sha256pwcmp() in ldap/servers/plugins/pwdstorage/pbkdf2pwd.c uses standard memcmp() for hash comparison instead of the project's constant-time slapictmemcmp(). Every other password storage scheme in the same plugin uses slapictmemcmp(), which was introduced specifically to prevent timing side-channels (see CVE-2016-5405). This inconsistency allows a remote attacker with network access to the LDAP service to potentially infer partial hash information through repeated timing measurements of LDAP bind attempts. Practical exploitation is extremely difficult due to the PBKDF2 work factor (8192+ iterations, ~2ms computation time) which dominates and masks the nanosecond-level memcmp timing delta.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The PBKDF2-SHA256 password storage plugin does not enforce an upper bound on the iteration count extracted from stored password hashes. A privileged attacker who can modify a user's password hash can cause excessive CPU consumption during authentication, resulting in denial of service.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The SMD5 password storage plugin performs unsigned integer underflow when computing salt length from a crafted password hash shorter than 16 bytes, causing a buffer over-read that crashes the LDAP server during authentication.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. During schema reload, the attrsyntaxswapht() function unconditionally frees attribute syntax information nodes, bypassing the refcount-based deferred deletion used elsewhere in the attribute syntax subsystem. If an administrator triggers schema reload while concurrent LDAP query traffic is active, worker threads may access freed memory, resulting in use-after-free or double-free and a denial of service (server crash).

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. The LDIF parser reads past the end of a heap buffer when processing attribute types with trailing semicolons during database import, causing an out-of-bounds read detectable under memory instrumentation.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server. A type confusion in the SSO token extended operation handler causes partial stack address information to be disclosed in LDAP responses to authenticated users.

A flaw was found in 389 Directory Server in the aclpnormalizeacltxt() function of aclparse.c. A malformed ACI (Access Control Instruction) string can trigger heap-buffer-overflow writes and reads during ACI parsing. The function fails to validate that the ACI keyword has sufficient length after whitespace stripping, leading to a 1-byte out-of-bounds write and subsequent out-of-bounds reads. An authenticated user with write access to the aci attribute could send a crafted ACI value to silently corrupt heap memory in the directory server process.