CVE-2023-51663: Hail authentication can be bypassed by changing email address

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-12-29 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-289

Description

Hail is an open-source, general-purpose, Python-based data analysis tool with additional data types and methods for working with genomic data. Hail relies on OpenID Connect (OIDC) email addresses from ID tokens to verify the validity of a user's domain, but because users have the ability to change their email address, they could create accounts and use resources in clusters that they should not have access to. For example, a user could create a Microsoft or Google account and then change their email to `test@example.org`. This account can then be used to create a Hail Batch account in Hail Batch clusters whose organization domain is `example.org`. The attacker is not able to access private data or impersonate another user, but they would have the ability to run jobs if Hail Batch billing projects are enabled and create Azure Tenants if they have Azure Active Directory Administrator access.

Affected products

hail-is hail: before 0.2.127 — fixed in 0.2.127

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: hail-is hail 0.2.127. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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