CVE-2026-59093: Weaviate < 1.38.0 - Privilege Escalation via Unchecked Permissions in RBAC Role Assignment

Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-07-02 · updated 2026-07-14
Weakness: CWE-266

Description

Weaviate before 1.38.0 does not verify that a principal performing an RBAC role assignment holds the permissions granted by the assigned role. The assignRoleToUser and assignRoleToGroup handlers (POST /authz/users/{id}/assign and /authz/groups/{id}/assign) authorize only that the caller may assign roles to the target user or group, not the permissions contained in the assigned roles, unlike role creation which enforces that a user can only create roles with permissions less than or equal to its own. A user holding only the delegated assign_and_revoke_users or assign_and_revoke_groups permission can assign the built-in admin role, or any high-privilege custom role, to itself or others, escalating to full administrative control of the database.

Affected products

weaviate: before 1.38.0 — fixed in 1.38.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: weaviate 1.38.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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