CVE-2021-43835: Privilege escalation in the Sulu Admin panel

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2021-12-15 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-269

Description

Sulu is an open-source PHP content management system based on the Symfony framework. In affected versions Sulu users who have access to any subset of the admin UI are able to elevate their privilege. Over the API it was possible for them to give themselves permissions to areas which they did not already had. This issue was introduced in 2.0.0-RC1 with the new ProfileController putAction. The versions have been patched in 2.2.18, 2.3.8 and 2.4.0. For users unable to upgrade the only known workaround is to apply a patch to the ProfileController manually.

Affected products

sulu: from 2.0.0 before 2.2.18; from 2.3.0 before 2.3.8; 2.4.0-rc1 — fixed in 2.2.18, 2.3.8

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: sulu 2.2.18, 2.3.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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