CVE-2026-35595: Vikunja Affected by Privilege Escalation via Project Reparenting

Severity: high (CVSS 8.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2026-04-10 · updated 2026-10-26
Weakness: CWE-269

Description

Vikunja is an open-source self-hosted task management platform. Prior to 2.3.0, the CanUpdate check at pkg/models/project_permissions.go:139-148 only requires CanWrite on the new parent project when changing parent_project_id. However, Vikunja's permission model uses a recursive CTE that walks up the project hierarchy to compute permissions. Moving a project under a different parent changes the permission inheritance chain. When a user has inherited Write access (from a parent project share) and reparents the child project under their own project tree, the CTE resolves their ownership of the new parent as Admin (permission level 2) on the moved project. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.3.0.

Affected products

go-vikunja vikunja: before 2.3.0 — fixed in 2.3.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: go-vikunja vikunja 2.3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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