CVE-2023-3326: Freebsd

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 1.1% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

pam_krb5 authenticates a user by essentially running kinit with the password, getting a ticket-granting ticket (tgt) from the Kerberos KDC (Key Distribution Center) over the network, as a way to verify the password. However, if a keytab is not provisioned on the system, pam_krb5 has no way to validate the response from the KDC, and essentially trusts the tgt provided over the network as being valid. In a non-default FreeBSD installation that leverages pam_krb5 for authentication and does not have a keytab provisioned, an attacker that is able to control both the password and the KDC responses can return a valid tgt, allowing authentication to occur for any user on the system.

Affected products

• Freebsd Freebsd: before 12.4 (fixed in 12.4); from 13.0, before 13.1 (fixed in 13.1); version 12.4 only; version 13.1 only; version 13.2 only

Published 2023-06-22. Last modified 2026-06-17.