What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-72914: Mastodon: Exhausting data by an unauthenticated request to the admin retention API

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-10 · updated 2026-09-09
• Weakness: CWE-405

Description

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. Prior to 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1, the administrative statistics endpoints handled by Api::V1::Admin::MeasuresController and Api::V1::Admin::RetentionController checked authorization only after beginning expensive calculations. Anonymous callers could submit keys, start_at, and end_at parameters that caused long-running SQL queries in Admin::Metrics::Measure, Admin::Metrics::Retention, and Admin::Metrics::Dimension::BaseDimension, allowing repeated requests to exhaust server resources. This issue is fixed in versions 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1.

Affected products

• mastodon: before 4.4.21; from 4.5.0-beta.1, < 4.5.14; from 4.6.0-beta.1, < 4.6.4

References

• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/18c61f286f1f5718a8f517940ba384866ffa3892
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/467c933459c7d0e5513475b9e4888afaedfb1074
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/930aa9fee26bf9eaefe27826fa1061288d83373b
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/da47a1bd3cd07935d7ca55a1f4f1a76f7f167e0d
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.4.21
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.5.14
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.6.4
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.7.0-beta.1
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/security/advisories/GHSA-7jvv-fhmg-wpfw

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