GHSA-849r-qrwj-8rv4
GitHub Security Advisory
Directus allows unauthenticated access to WebSocket events and operations
Advisory Details
### Summary
When setting `WEBSOCKETS_GRAPHQL_AUTH` or `WEBSOCKETS_REST_AUTH` to "public", an unauthenticated user is able to do any of the supported operations (CRUD, subscriptions) with full admin privileges.
### Details
Accountability for unauthenticated WebSocket requests is set to null, which used to be "public permissions" until the Permissions Policy update which now defaults that to system/admin level access. So instead of null we need to make use of `createDefaultAccountability()` to ensure public permissions are used for unauthenticated users.
### PoC
1. Start directus with
```bash
WEBSOCKETS_ENABLED=true
WEBSOCKETS_GRAPHQL_AUTH=public
WEBSOCKETS_REST_AUTH=public
```
2. Subscribe using GQL or REST or do any CRUD operation on a user created collection (system tables are not reachable with crud)
```gql
subscription {
directus_users_mutated {
key
event
data {
id
email
first_name
last_name
password
}
}
}
```
or
```json
{
"type": "items",
"action": "read",
"collection": "your_collection_name"
}
```
3a. Open up the data studio as any user. Observe how the subscriber gets notified on each page navigation (because the users `last_page` gets updated, the `password` fields is properly redacted here)
3b. Observe receiving all available items from the `your_collection_name` collection.
### Impact
This impacts any Directus instance that has either `WEBSOCKETS_GRAPHQL_AUTH` or `WEBSOCKETS_REST_AUTH` set to `public` allowing unauthenticated users to subscribe for changes on any collection or do REST CRUD operations on user defined collections ignoring permissions.
Affected Packages
Related CVEs
Key Information
Dataset
Data from GitHub Advisory Database. This information is provided for research and educational purposes.