What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-45725: Apache CouchDB, IBM Cloudant: Privilege Escalation Using _design Documents

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.7 v3.1)
• 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: 2023-12-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-200

Description

Design document functions which receive a user http request object may expose authorization or session cookie headers of the user who accesses the document. These design document functions are: *   list *   show *   rewrite *   update An attacker can leak the session component using an HTML-like output, insert the session as an external resource (such as an image), or store the credential in a _local document with an "update" function. For the attack to succeed the attacker has to be able to insert the design documents into the database, then manipulate a user to access a function from that design document. Workaround: Avoid using design documents from untrusted sources which may attempt to access or manipulate request object's headers

Affected products

• Apache Software Foundation Apache CouchDB: through 3.3.2

References

• https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/cve/2023-45725.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread/pqjq9zt8vq9rsobkc1cow9sqm9vozlrg
• https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/cve/2023-45725.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread/pqjq9zt8vq9rsobkc1cow9sqm9vozlrg

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