Executive brief
FreeIPA is an identity management and authentication service used across enterprise environments to centralize user and access control. An attacker can send an oversized request to the `/ipa/i18n_messages` endpoint without authentication, causing the service to consume excessive memory and become unresponsive, disrupting authentication and access to all systems relying on this service.
Technical details
This is a denial-of-service vulnerability caused by unbounded request body processing in the `/ipa/i18n_messages` endpoint. The vulnerability is triggered by sending an arbitrarily large HTTP request body to this endpoint, which lacks proper input validation and memory limits. No authentication is required to exploit this flaw, and it is network-reachable. A remote attacker can exhaust the service's memory, causing degraded responsiveness, service crashes, and denial of service. A patch addressing this issue is available in Red Hat's advisory RHSA-2026:70564.
Affected products
- Red Hat FreeIPA <UNKNOWN>
Timeline
- 2026-08-20: disclosed: CVE-2026-73198 published
- 2026-09-23: patched: Red Hat security advisory RHSA-2026:70564 released