Daily Insight: Identity Bypass | FortiGate SSO Authentication Collapse

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Executive Snapshot

FortiCloud SSO authentication assumed SAML signature verification would stop forged assertions. It did not. With over 50% global firewall market share and 775,000 customers, FortiGate's authentication boundary failure now affects more perimeters than any other appliance vulnerability this year.

Signal

Attackers exploited CVE-2025-59718 within three days of disclosure, bypassing authentication via crafted SAML messages to export full device configurations including hashed credentials.

Diagnostic Takeaway

Your firewall's identity layer is not your identity layer. FortiCloud SSO auto-enables during FortiCare registration via GUI. Administrators who never explicitly enabled SSO are now exposed because a support workflow activated an authentication surface they never governed.

Executive Verdict

This was not a misconfiguration. This was trust creation without security consent. A commercial registration workflow silently activated federated identity on your perimeter's most privileged surface. Revenue operations created an authentication boundary that security never approved, never governed, and never knew existed. The failure is not SAML mechanics. The failure is organizational privilege escalation: support workflows now outrank security architecture. Any enterprise that lacks a policy requiring security sign-off before federated trust activation is operating on inherited risk they cannot see.

Framework: Identity Failure Layer

• Cascading Trust Collapse: One registration checkbox crossed three trust planes: protocol boundary (SAML signature bypass), administrative surface (auto-enabled SSO), and credential exposure (config exfiltration). This was not three issues. This was one invisible decision with multi-layer blast radius.

Action

Audit all FortiGate, FortiProxy, FortiSwitchManager, and FortiWeb instances for FortiCloud SSO status today. Disable FortiCloud SSO on any device not yet patched and reset all firewall administrator credentials if suspicious activity is detected. Then fix the governance gap: mandate inventory of all auto-enabled identity features across your infrastructure, require explicit security approval before any federated trust activation, and classify vendor support workflows as privileged attack surfaces subject to change control.

Decision and corrective implications are addressed in this week's CISO Briefing.