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HIGH7.5

GHSA-849r-qrwj-8rv4

Directus allows unauthenticated access to WebSocket events and operations

Quick fix

GHSA-849r-qrwj-8rv4 — directus: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

npm install directus@11.3.0

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.

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

npm/directus
Introduced in: 11.0.0Fixed in: 11.3.0
Fixnpm install directus@11.3.0
npm/@directus/api
Introduced in: 22.2.0Fixed in: 23.2.0
Fixnpm install @directus/api@23.2.0

References