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An unauthenticated LDAP client (anonymous bind or SASL ANONYMOUS) can create a self-managed OTP token entry with empty ipaTokenOwner/managedBy attributes, which satisfy 389 Directory Server's SELFDN ACI evaluator against the anonymous bind's own empty DN (see companion 389-ds flaw for that underlying defect). FreeIPA's self-managed-token ACI (install/share/default-aci.ldif) does not restrict which other attributes may be added, allowing the client to inject an arbitrary attacker-chosen Kerberos principal and password.

The originally reported technique forged the literal admin@REALM principal via a canonical-name collision with the existing admin account. A prior fix (CVE-2026-13097) now blocks that specific collision: live re-testing on a patched instance shows the LDAP ADD is rejected (err=19, constraint violation) once all rotated canonical spellings collide with the existing admin entry. This does not fix the underlying anonymous-write defect, only the admin-name-collision special case.

The attack reformulates trivially: the same anonymous bypass creates a new, non-colliding Kerberos principal (not named admin, so no collision occurs), and that new principal is then added to cn=admins,cn=groups,cn=accounts,$SUFFIX -- independently verified by the FreeIPA maintainer team to still succeed, since the vulnerable ACI does not otherwise restrict group-membership changes reachable from the same anonymous foothold. The end state is unchanged: an unauthenticated attacker obtains a Kerberos principal that is a genuine member of the administrators group, i.e. real FreeIPA administrative privileges, under an attacker-chosen name rather than literally 'admin'. On SID-enabled deployments, the anonymously-readable ipaNTSecurityIdentifier attribute lets the attacker also obtain a PAC-bearing TGT, extending access to HTTP/Dogtag.

Independently reproduced twice by Red Hat against a stock, unmodified freeipa/freeipa-server:almalinux-10 (FreeIPA 4.13.1) install using the original admin-name-collision technique, most recently from a client with zero prior access (no ticket, no local presence, network reachability only), and verified beyond the PoC's own output via klist -f, ldapwhoami -Y GSSAPI, ldapcompare (cn=admins membership), and a real admin-only write/delete (ipa user-add / ipa user-del). The reformulated create-new-principal-then-add-to-admins variant has been verified by the FreeIPA maintainer team but not yet independently reproduced by Red Hat; that reproduction is still pending.