CVE-2023-25559: System account impersonation in DataHub

Severity: high (CVSS 8.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-02-11 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-287

Description

DataHub is an open-source metadata platform. When not using authentication for the metadata service, which is the default configuration, the Metadata service (GMS) will use the X-DataHub-Actor HTTP header to infer the user the frontend is sending the request on behalf of. When the backends retrieves the header, its name is retrieved in a case-insensitive way. This case differential can be abused by an attacker to smuggle an X-DataHub-Actor header with different casing (eg: X-DATAHUB-ACTOR). This issue may lead to an authorization bypass by allowing any user to impersonate the system user account and perform any actions on its behalf. This vulnerability was discovered and reported by the GitHub Security lab and is tracked as GHSL-2022-079.

Affected products

datahub-project datahub: before 0.8.45 — fixed in 0.8.45

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: datahub-project datahub 0.8.45. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2023-25559 or the next vulnerability affects your stack