What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-16895: Authentication Bypass in Metasploit JSON-RPC Service When DB Health Check Fails

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.1 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-27 · updated 2026-08-28
• Weakness: CWE-305

Description

A logic vulnerability (fail-open condition) has been identified within the Metasploit Framework's JSON-RPC web service interface. When an exception occurs during the database health check (db.check) and the environment variable MSF_WS_JSON_RPC_API_TOKEN is not explicitly set, the application resets the internal state flag msf.auth_initialized to false. The ApiToken Warden authentication strategy misinterprets this false value as an indicator that authentication is not initialized or required, thereby granting unauthenticated local access to the JSON-RPC request dispatcher.

Affected products

• Rapid7 Metasploit-framework: before 6.5.2 — fixed in 6.5.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Rapid7 Metasploit-framework 6.5.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/pull/21768
• https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/pt-metasploit-wrap-up-lot-of-summer-shells-and-fit-http-profiles/

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