CVE-2021-41189: Communities and collections administrators can escalate their privilege up to system administrator

Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2021-10-29 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-863

Description

DSpace is an open source turnkey repository application. In version 7.0, any community or collection administrator can escalate their permission up to become system administrator. This vulnerability only exists in 7.0 and does not impact 6.x or below. This issue is patched in version 7.1. As a workaround, users of 7.0 may temporarily disable the ability for community or collection administrators to manage permissions or workflows settings.

Affected products

DSpace: 7.0

References

https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/commit/277b499a5cd3a4f5eb2370513a1b7e4ec2a6e041
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/commit/c3bea16ab911606e15ae96c97a1575e1ffb14f8a
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/7928
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/security/advisories/GHSA-cf2j-vf36-c6w8
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/commit/277b499a5cd3a4f5eb2370513a1b7e4ec2a6e041
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/commit/c3bea16ab911606e15ae96c97a1575e1ffb14f8a
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/7928
https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/security/advisories/GHSA-cf2j-vf36-c6w8

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