CVE-2024-41952: Zitadel has an "Ignoring unknown usernames" vulnerability

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-07-31 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-203

Description

Zitadel is an open source identity management system. ZITADEL administrators can enable a setting called "Ignoring unknown usernames" which helps mitigate attacks that try to guess/enumerate usernames. If enabled, ZITADEL will show the password prompt even if the user doesn't exist and report "Username or Password invalid". Due to a implementation change to prevent deadlocks calling the database, the flag would not be correctly respected in all cases and an attacker would gain information if an account exist within ZITADEL, since the error message shows "object not found" instead of the generic error message. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.58.1, 2.57.1, 2.56.2, 2.55.5, 2.54.8, and 2.53.9.

Affected products

zitadel: from 2.53.0 before 2.53.9; from 2.54.0 before 2.54.8; from 2.55.0 before 2.55.5; from 2.56.0 before 2.56.2; 2.57.0, 2.57.0-rc1, 2.57.0-rc2, 2.58.0 — fixed in 2.53.9, 2.54.8, 2.55.5, 2.56.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: zitadel 2.53.9, 2.54.8, 2.55.5, 2.56.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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