CVE-2026-44883: Portainer: JWT accepted in URL query leaks tokens to logs and referers

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 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: 2026-05-28 · updated 2026-07-21
Weakness: CWE-598

Description

Portainer Community Edition is a lightweight service delivery platform for containerized applications that can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes and ACI environments. From 2.33.0 to before 2.33.8, 2.39.2, and 2.41.0, Portainer's authentication middleware accepts JWT bearer tokens passed as the ?token=<JWT> URL query parameter on any authenticated API endpoint, in addition to the standard Authorization: Bearer header. URLs are recorded in reverse-proxy access logs, browser history, and HTTP Referer headers on outbound navigation, so any JWT passed this way can be harvested by anyone with access to those logs or by an external site the user subsequently visits. A leaked token grants the full privileges of the user it was issued to, until the token expires (default 8 hours, configurable). The ?token= parameter was used by Portainer's browser-based container attach, exec, and pod shell features, so any user with exec or attach rights on a container was exposed — not only administrators. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.33.8, 2.39.2, and 2.41.0.

Affected products

portainer: from 2.33.0 before 2.33.8; from 2.34.0 before 2.39.2; from 2.40.0 before 2.41.0 — fixed in 2.33.8, 2.39.2, 2.41.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: portainer 2.33.8, 2.39.2, 2.41.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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