Technical impact
389-ds-base contains a flaw where the LDBM backend encrypts attribute values with a hard‑coded static initialization vector for AES‑CBC and 3DES‑CBC. Because the IV who can read the on‑disk database files can compare discover whether two encrypted attributes hold the same plaintext value. The plaintext itself remains encrypted, but the ability to infer equality can aid in mapping and anonymization attacks. This weakness is classified as CWE‑329. Based on the description, an attacker can therefore use this information to identify matching records, an inference that is not explicitly stated in the input and is therefore deduced.
Affected Systems
All Red Hat Directory Server releases 11, 12, and 13, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 through 10, are affected. The CVE lists these products explicitly via Red Hat identifiers. No specific version limits are provided beyond the product families; all iterations of the listed products remain vulnerable until a patch is applied.
Risk and Exploitability
The CVSS score of 4.4 indicates a moderate severity, while the EPSS score of less than 1 % means the probability of exploitation is low. The vulnerability is not in KEV catalog, implying no publicly known active exploits. Exploitation requires local or remote privileged access that allows read permission on the LDBM database directory (e.g. /var/lib/dirsrv/slapd‑<instance>/db/). Consequently, the risk is limited to environments where an attacker already has deep filesystem access. Even in such cases, the attacker learns only equality relationships between stored attributes, not the actual data.
