Case-Sensitive Authorization Check Bypass via Identity Zone ID Case Manipulation Leads to Full UAA Compromise

Summary

Improper handling of case sensitivity (CWE-178) in the identity zone authorization check in the Identity Zone Endpoint in Cloud Foundry UAA allows a remote authenticated attacker holding only the zones.write authority to bypass the intended restriction that this authority does not grant access to the privileged uaa (system) identity zone, by referring to the zone identifier in a non-lowercase form (e.g. UAA) in the request path and body. The authorization layer performs a case-sensitive comparison against the system zone identifier, while the underlying MySQL persistence layer resolves identifiers case-insensitively under its default collation, so the request is authorized incorrectly and is then resolved against the real system zone record. This allows the attacker to overwrite the system zone's JWT signing key with attacker-controlled key material, forge JWTs claiming the admin client and administrator scopes, and fully compromise UAA and any Cloud Foundry deployment that trusts it. This issue only affects UAA deployments backed by MySQL using its default collation; PostgreSQL and HSQLDB backends are not affected.

Timeline

1. Aug 25, 2026, 11:05 AM UTCCVE published
2. Aug 25, 2026, 1:08 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

3. Aug 25, 2026, 1:09 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• Cloud Foundry UAA

  fixed in 78.16.0

• Cloud Foundry cf-deployment

  fixed in 57.0.0

References 1