It was reported that, when a user changes their password in Red Hat Directory Server or 389, that the unhashed#user#password attribute (which stores the password in plaintext format, for the purposes of password policy and Windows sync), is available for any authenticed user to view. Any user who can successfully bind to the directory server can request and view this attribute under certain conditions, without administrative privileges. This attribute is only exposed in the time between a user changing their password and the directory server being restarted. This was reported previously as a bug in 389, however the report only indicated that the exposure was to administrator logins, which is not the case. https://fedorahosted.org/389/ticket/378
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2012:0997 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0997.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Directory Server 8 for RHEL 5 Via RHSA-2012:1041 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1041.html
Created 389-ds-base tracking bugs for this issue Affects: fedora-all [bug 835668] Affects: epel-5 [bug 835669]
This was fixed in 389-ds-base 1.2.11.6. Fedora 17 currently has 1.2.11.17 and 18 has 1.3.0, so I would consider this fixed. A patch was included in the EPEL5 1.2.10.12-1 package to correct this.