CVE-2021-32701

CVE-2021-32701 is a high-severity access bypass vulnerability affecting ORY Oathkeeper, an Identity & Access Proxy. It allows an attacker to bypass scope-based access controls due to improper caching of OAuth2 introspection results. Specifically, if a token is initially valid for one scope and then cached, subsequent requests for different scopes will incorrectly validate the token from the cache, even if it lacks the required new scope. The vulnerability has a CVSS score of 7.5 (HIGH) with a vector of AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N, indicating it can be exploited remotely with low complexity and no user interaction, leading to high confidentiality impact. By default, caching is disabled for the oauth2_introspection authenticator, which mitigates this issue; otherwise, a patch was released in v0.38.12-beta.1. There is no evidence of active exploitation, public exploit code (Metasploit, Nuclei, ExploitDB), or significant community discussion or media coverage surrounding this CVE. Its EPSS score is very low, suggesting a minimal probability of exploitation in the wild.