Summary
Impact: Elevation of Privilege. Microsoft rating: Important. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Unlikely. Customer action: Required.
Details
How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?
An attacker who controls authentication in a trusted forest could send specially crafted authentication information to the target forest. Successful exploitation could raise the integrity level of the attacker's identity to System, allowing actions otherwise blocked by integrity-level restrictions where existing resource permissions already allow access. This does not grant SYSTEM-account privileges or target-forest administrator membership.
According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?
Successful exploitation requires an existing trust relationship between the attacker's forest and the target forest, together with resource permissions that already allow the attacker's identity access. The vulnerability bypasses integrity-level restrictions but does not grant otherwise absent resource access permissions.
Security updates
10.0.14393.9688 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131291
10.0.17763.9487 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131085
10.0.19044.7846 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131096
10.0.20348.5870 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131090
10.0.22631.7711 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131087
10.0.26100.9974 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5132061
10.0.26100.9911 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5132043
10.0.26100.33822 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131080
10.0.26100.33730 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131077
10.0.28000.3501 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5132059
Vulnerabilities 1
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High 8.0
Windows Kerberos Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Weak authentication in Windows Kerberos allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network.
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2026-122164 Windows Kerberos Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-122164
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Microsoft Exploitability Index
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/exploitability-index?rtc=1
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Microsoft Support Lifecycle
https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle
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Common Vulnerability Scoring System
https://www.first.org/cvss