What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-21646: Lookup operations do not take into account wildcards in SpiceDB

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2022-01-11 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

SpiceDB is a database system for managing security-critical application permissions. Any user making use of a wildcard relationship under the right hand branch of an `exclusion` or within an `intersection` operation will see `Lookup`/`LookupResources` return a resource as "accessible" if it is *not* accessible by virtue of the inclusion of the wildcard in the intersection or the right side of the exclusion. In `v1.3.0`, the wildcard is ignored entirely in lookup's dispatch, resulting in the `banned` wildcard being ignored in the exclusion. Version 1.4.0 contains a patch for this issue. As a workaround, don't make use of wildcards on the right side of intersections or within exclusions.

Affected products

• authzed spicedb: 1.3.0

References

• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/commit/15bba2e2d2a4bda336a37a7fe8ef8a35028cd970
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/issues/358
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/releases/tag/v1.4.0
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/security/advisories/GHSA-7p8f-8hjm-wm92
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/commit/15bba2e2d2a4bda336a37a7fe8ef8a35028cd970
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/issues/358
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/releases/tag/v1.4.0
• https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/security/advisories/GHSA-7p8f-8hjm-wm92

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