CVE-2026-102111

Executive Summary

CVE-2026-102111 is a configuration-validation flaw in Kiteworks (CWE-1284 — Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input) in which the product failed to enforce the maximum permitted value for a configurable security-policy setting. An authenticated administrator can set the value outside its intended range, causing the associated security control to never activate while the administrative interface and audit log continue to report the control as enabled. The impact is a silent, integrity-affecting degradation of a security control (CVSS 4.9), requiring high privileges and no user interaction, and no public exploit or patch currently exists.

Technical Analysis

The vulnerability resides in the security-policy configuration subsystem of Kiteworks. Per the NVD description, the product "did not enforce the maximum permitted value for a configurable security-policy setting." CWE-1284 (Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input) is the assigned weakness class, which describes precisely this failure mode: an input that represents a quantity, threshold, count, or bounded numeric parameter is accepted without validating it against its allowed maximum.

The attack surface is the administrative configuration interface (and its underlying configuration API/backend) that accepts administrator-supplied policy values. Because no upper-bound check exists on the configurable value, an administrator can commit a value that lies outside the range in which the associated control is designed to operate. The critical consequence, as stated in the description, is that the "associated control never activated" — the value placed the control into a non-functional state rather than rejecting the input or clamping it to the maximum.

Two secondary weaknesses compound the primary defect:

1. False state reporting. "The control continued to appear enabled in the administrative interface and audit log." The system's representation of control state (enabled/disabled) is decoupled from the control's actual operational state. This is a UI/telemetry integrity failure layered on top of the validation failure.
2. Silent failure. No error, warning, or audit discrepancy is produced. The administrator (or an attacker acting as administrator) receives affirmative confirmation that the control is active, while in reality it is inert.

The CVSS vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N confirms: network-accessible (AV:N), low attack complexity (AC:L), high privileges required (PR:H — the administrator role), no user interaction (UI:N), scope unchanged (S:U), no confidentiality impact (C:N), high integrity impact (I:H), no availability impact (A:N). The single high-impact metric is Integrity — consistent with a control being silently altered from its intended enforced state to an ineffective state, without data disclosure or service loss.

The provided intelligence does not disclose the specific policy setting name, its intended numeric range, the configuration parameter, or the affected product versions. No affected version range, OSV package data, or vendor advisory is available. These details are required before any product-version-specific conclusion can be drawn; until then, only the vulnerability class, mechanism, and impact pattern can be characterized with confidence.

Exploitation Scenarios

No public proof-of-concept, Nuclei template, or exploit code is available. The attack chain below is inferred strictly from the vulnerability class (CWE-1284) and the NVD description. No function names, endpoints, or parameter names are invented; where the description is silent, the scenario is described at the vulnerability-class level.

1. Reconnaissance / target identification. The attacker identifies a Kiteworks deployment and obtains administrative credentials through a separate means (credential phishing, credential reuse, session hijacking, or a prior privilege-escalation compromise). The flaw is only reachable by an authenticated administrator (PR:H), so acquiring or abusing admin access is a precondition, not part of the exploit itself.

2. Triggering the flaw class. Using the administrative interface, the attacker locates the configurable security-policy setting in question and submits a value above the maximum permitted value. Because CVE-2026-102111 is an improper-validation-of-quantity defect, the malformed value is accepted rather than rejected or clamped. The control's numeric parameter is now outside the range in which enforcement logic functions.

3. Payload / execution method. No code payload or memory-corruption primitive is involved. The "payload" is the out-of-range configuration value itself, submitted through the normal administrative configuration path. There is no injection string, shell command, or serialized object described in the available intelligence; the exploit is a policy-value manipulation, not a code-execution chain.

4. Post-exploitation impact. The targeted security control ceases to operate ("never activated"), while the administrative console and audit log continue to present the control as enabled. The attacker has now silently rendered the defensive control ineffective. Subsequent activity that the control would have detected, blocked, or logged (depending on which control the policy governs — not specified in the available data) can proceed without triggering the expected countermeasure, and the falsified "enabled" state in the audit log degrades the reliability of any post-incident forensic reconstruction.

Because the exact control has not been disclosed, the downstream blast radius of neutralizing it cannot be precisely stated from the provided data.

Impact Assessment

Business impact is concentrated in the Integrity domain (CVSS I:H) rather than Confidentiality or Availability. An organization subject to this flaw can suffer a silent failure of a compliance-relevant or security-enforcing control while dashboards, interfaces, and audit trails assert the control is functioning. This undermines:

• Security assurance and audit integrity: auditors and administrators relying on the reported "enabled" state are misled regarding actual posture.
• Defense-in-depth degradation: a layer of protection assumed present is effectively absent, weakening layer interdependence.
• Incident reconstruction: because the audit log reports a false positive state, forensic timelines of when the control was actually inoperative are unreliable.

The CVSS base score of 4.9 (Medium) reflects the mitigating factors of high privilege requirement (PR:H) and no confidentiality or availability impact, offset by low complexity and high integrity impact. Blast radius is bounded by the privilege prerequisite: a non-administrative actor cannot exploit this directly. However, any organization that has been compromised at the administrative tier — or that operates with shared/insufficiently segregated admin accounts — inherits the full integrity impact. The absence of a patch (patch confidence 0/4), absence of a CISA KEV listing, and absence of public exploitation mean there is currently no evidence of active in-the-wild abuse, but also no vendor-remediated state to fall back on.

Affected systems: Kiteworks deployments exposing the configurable security-policy setting described in the CNA record. Specific product versions are not identified in the available intelligence.

Detection Guidance

Detection for this vulnerability is behavioral: because the flaw is a configuration-integrity issue and the resulting state is falsely reported, the most reliable detection points are (a) changes to security-policy configuration values, and (b) divergence between reported control state and actual enforcement. The rules below are written generically because specific parameter names, endpoints, and log field names are not present in the provided intelligence; fields must be mapped to the local deployment.

Sigma Rule

title: Kiteworks Security Policy Configuration Changed Outside Permitted Range
id: 8f3c1a2e-4b7d-4e91-9c2a-7d5e0f1a6b34
status: experimental
description: Detects administrative modification of a Kiteworks security-policy setting consistent with CVE-2026-102111 (CWE-1284). Tune field names to local log schema.
references:
  - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-102111
author: valtersit.com
date: 2026/01/01
logsource:
  product: kiteworks
  service: audit
detection:
  selection_action:
    event_type:
      - 'config_change'
      - 'policy_update'
      - 'admin_action'
  selection_component:
    component|contains:
      - 'security'
      - 'policy'
  selection_actor:
    actor_role: 'administrator'
  condition: selection_action and selection_component and selection_actor
falsepositives:
  - Legitimate planned policy changes by administrators (require change-ticket correlation)
level: medium
tags:
  - attack.defense_evasion
  - attack.t1562.001
  - cve.2026.102111

YARA Rule

rule CVE_2026_102111_Kiteworks_Policy_MaxValue_Bypass
{
    meta:
        description = "Detection aid for Kiteworks security-policy configuration artifacts referencing out-of-range policy values (CVE-2026-102111). No PoC available; heuristic file/content match only."
        author = "valtersit.com"
        reference = "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-102111"
        cve = "CVE-2026-102111"
        date = "2026-01-01"

    strings:
        $cfg1 = "security_policy" ascii nocase
        $cfg2 = "policy_setting" ascii nocase
        $cfg3 = "max_value" ascii nocase
        $kw1  = "Kiteworks" ascii nocase

    condition:
        $kw1 and any of ($cfg*)
}

Suricata IDS Rule

alert http any any -> any any (msg:"CVE-2026-102111 Kiteworks security-policy configuration change by administrator"; flow:established,to_server; http.method; content:"POST"; http.uri; content:"policy"; nocase; http.uri; content:"config"; nocase; http.header; content:"Cookie"; nocase; classtype:attempted-admin; reference:cve,2026-102111; reference:url,nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-102111; sid:2026102111; rev:1;)

Note: URI keywords must be tuned to the actual deployment path; this rule intentionally uses generic policy/config substrings because the specific endpoint is not disclosed in the available intelligence. Broad matching will generate false positives and should be correlated with authenticated-admin context.

Elastic Detection

sequence by user.name with maxspan=5m
  [ authentication where event.outcome == "success" and user.roles : "administrator" ]
  [ any where event.category == "configuration" and event.action : ("config_change" or "policy_update") and kiteworks.component : "security_policy" ]

This EQL detects an administrator authentication immediately followed by a security-policy configuration change, which is the behavioral signature of CVE-2026-102111 abuse. Field names must be mapped to the local Elastic Common Schema (ECS) integration for Kiteworks audit logs; kiteworks.component is a placeholder for the deployment-specific namespace.

Splunk SPL Query

index=kiteworks sourcetype=kiteworks:audit (event_type="config_change" OR event_type="policy_update")
| search component=*securit* OR component=*policy*
| where actor_role="administrator"
| stats count min(_time) as first_seen max(_time) as last_seen values(component) as components values(new_value) as new_values by actor_user, src_ip
| where count >= 1
| convert ctime(first_seen) ctime(last_seen)
| sort - last_seen

Correlate actor_user and src_ip against change-management tickets. Alerts on any administrator-initiated security-policy configuration change; high-value target if the modified setting matches the policy referenced by CVE-2026-102111.

Wazuh OSSEC Rule

<group name="kiteworks,cve-2026-102111,">
  <rule id="100211" level="10">
    <decoded_as>json</decoded_as>
    <field name="event_type">config_change|policy_update</field>
    <field name="component">security|policy</field>
    <field name="actor_role">administrator</field>
    <description>CVE-2026-102111: Administrator modified Kiteworks security-policy configuration (CWE-1284) - verify value within permitted range</description>
    <mitre>
      <id>T1562.001</id>
    </mitre>
  </rule>
</group>

Field names (event_type, component, actor_role) must be aligned to the actual decoded JSON schema used by the Kiteworks audit log ingestion in the local Wazuh deployment.

Mitigation & Patch Guidance

Patch confidence is 0/4 (UNPATCHED). No vendor fix, workaround, affected-version list, or advisory is present in the tracked sources. The guidance below is therefore compensating-control oriented and does not reference a specific fixed release.

1. Immediate mitigations

   • Restrict administrator access to the Kiteworks management interface to the minimum necessary set of accounts; enforce strong, unique credentials and phishing-resistant MFA on all admin accounts.
   • Tighten change control: any modification to security-policy settings must require a documented change ticket and out-of-band approval, since the flaw's signature is an unauthorized policy edit.
   • Where possible, baseline and snapshot known-good security-policy configuration values and compare on a recurring schedule to detect out-of-range values.
   • Compensate for the possibly-disabled control at the network/endpoint layer: do not assume the Kiteworks policy control is enforcing until the value is independently verified.
   • Deploy the Wazuh and Sigma detections above to alert on all administrator-initiated security-policy configuration changes.

2. Patch / upgrade steps

   • Monitor the Kiteworks security advisories and the NVD entry for CVE-2026-102111 for the authoritative fixed release. No patch reference exists at time of writing.
   • When a fix is published, validate that it introduces maximum-value enforcement on the affected setting and that the UI/audit log reflects true control state; test in a staging deployment before production rollout.

3. Long-term hardening

   • Enforce server-side range validation on all configuration inputs, including maximum bounds (directly remediates CWE-1284).
   • Decouple control-state reporting from configuration existence: a control should be reported "enabled" only when its parameters are within the valid operating range.
   • Implement configuration drift detection and immutability on security-relevant settings.
   • Apply least-privilege role design so that no single administrator account can silently alter security-enforcing policies without secondary approval.

References

1. National Vulnerability Database — CVE-2026-102111: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-102111
2. CWE-1284 — Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1284.html
3. MITRE ATT&CK T1562.001 — Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1562/001/
4. Kiteworks security advisories (vendor): https://www.kiteworks.com/security-advisories/
5. CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog (CVE-2026-102111 not currently listed at time of writing): https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog

No threat actor campaigns, exploit-in-the-wild evidence, public PoC, or CISA KEV listing are associated with CVE-2026-102111 in the available intelligence.