What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-41171: Bypass bruteforce protection on login form in elabftw

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2021-10-22 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-307

Description

eLabFTW is an open source electronic lab notebook manager for research teams. In versions of eLabFTW before 4.1.0, it allows attackers to bypass a brute-force protection mechanism by using many different forged PHPSESSID values in HTTP Cookie header. This issue has been addressed by implementing brute force login protection, as recommended by Owasp with Device Cookies. This mechanism will not impact users and will effectively thwart any brute-force attempts at guessing passwords. The only correct way to address this is to upgrade to version 4.1.0. Adding rate limitation upstream of the eLabFTW service is of course a valid option, with or without upgrading.

Affected products

• elabftw: before 4.1.0 — fixed in 4.1.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: elabftw 4.1.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw/commit/8e92afeec4c3a68dc88333881b7e6307f425706b
• https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw/releases/tag/4.1.0
• https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw/security/advisories/GHSA-q67h-5pc3-g6jv
• https://owasp.org/www-community/Slow_Down_Online_Guessing_Attacks_with_Device_Cookies
• https://www.exploit-db.com/docs/50436
• https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw/commit/8e92afeec4c3a68dc88333881b7e6307f425706b
• https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw/releases/tag/4.1.0
• https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw/security/advisories/GHSA-q67h-5pc3-g6jv
• https://owasp.org/www-community/Slow_Down_Online_Guessing_Attacks_with_Device_Cookies
• https://www.exploit-db.com/docs/50436

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