What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-53603: nebula-mesh: Operator session tokens stored in plaintext in the database

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v4.0)
• 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: 2026-09-04 · updated 2026-09-08
• Weakness: CWE-312

Description

nebula-mesh is a self-hosted control plane for Slack Nebula mesh VPN. Prior to version 0.3.8, Operator session tokens are stored in plaintext in the operator_sessions table (the token column is the PRIMARY KEY). The session token is a 32-byte random hex value sent directly in a cookie and valid for 24 hours. Anyone who can read the database (backup, snapshot, file copy, or SQL-level disclosure) obtains every active session token and can hijack operator sessions directly, with no further authentication. This issue has been patched in version 0.3.8.

Affected products

• forgekeep nebula-mesh: before 0.3.8

References

• https://github.com/forgekeep/nebula-mesh/commit/7cb01bab281ded557f8b6c81dab5f48d4c10182e
• https://github.com/forgekeep/nebula-mesh/releases/tag/v0.3.8
• https://github.com/forgekeep/nebula-mesh/security/advisories/GHSA-q4vm-pq3q-8wgq

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