Executive brief
OpenStack Ironic, a service for managing and provisioning bare metal machines, contains a vulnerability that allows for boot script injection. An attacker with high-level administrative access can inject malicious commands into the boot process of a server. This could allow the attacker to redirect the server to boot from a malicious source or compromise the security of the provisioning network.
Technical details
A vulnerability in OpenStack Ironic's kernel command line override logic allows for iPXE script injection. The root cause is the lack of sanitization for user-controlled values in 'instance_info' and 'driver_info' (specifically 'kernel_append_params' and 'ramdisk_kernel_arguments'), which are interpolated into PXE/iPXE boot templates. An attacker with sufficient privileges to modify node configuration can inject newlines or control characters to execute arbitrary iPXE commands. This can be used to redirect a node's boot process to an attacker-controlled kernel/initrd or leak sensitive agent tokens. The vulnerability is addressed by stripping control characters and preventing newline injection in boot parameters.
Affected products
- OpenStack Ironic >= 17.0.0, < 26.1.7; >= 27.0.0, < 29.0.6; >= 30.0.0, < 32.0.2; >= 33.0.0, < 35.0.2
Timeline
- 2026-04-29: other: Vulnerability reported to OpenStack via Launchpad
- 2026-06-03: advisory: OpenStack Security Advisory OSSA-2026-017 published
- 2026-06-04: disclosed: GHSA-jrh2-f5jc-xpgr published