CVE-2023-22746: CKAN is vulnerable to session secret shared across instances using Docker images

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-02-03 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-330

Description

CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. When creating a new container based on one of the Docker images listed below, the same secret key was being used by default. If the users didn't set a custom value via environment variables in the `.env` file, that key was shared across different CKAN instances, making it easy to forge authentication requests. Users overriding the default secret key in their own `.env` file are not affected by this issue. Note that the legacy images (ckan/ckan) located in the main CKAN repo are not affected by this issue. The affected images are ckan/ckan-docker, (ckan/ckan-base images), okfn/docker-ckan (openknowledge/ckan-base and openknowledge/ckan-dev images) keitaroinc/docker-ckan (keitaro/ckan images).

Affected products

ckan: before 2.8.12; from 2.9.0 before 2.9.7 — fixed in 2.8.12, 2.9.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: ckan 2.8.12, 2.9.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2023-22746 or the next vulnerability affects your stack