CVE-2023-51663 — hail
MEDIUMCVE-2023-51663 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-289 vulnerability in hail. A fix is available for hail — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Hail authentication can be bypassed by changing email address
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-51663.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-51663 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
hailReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Hail is an open-source, general-purpose, Python-based data analysis tool with additional data types and methods for working with genomic data. Hail relies on OpenID Connect (OIDC) email addresses from ID tokens to verify the validity of a user's domain, but because users have the ability to change their email address, they could create accounts and use resources in clusters that they should not have access to. For example, a user could create a Microsoft or Google account and then change their email to [email protected]. This account can then be used to create a Hail Batch account in Hail Batch clusters whose organization domain is example.org. The attacker is not able to access private data or impersonate another user, but they would have the ability to run jobs if Hail Batch billing projects are enabled and create Azure Tenants if they have Azure Active Directory Administrator access.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | hail | all versions | 0.2.127pip install --upgrade 'hail==0.2.127' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for hail, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update hail to 0.2.127 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-51663 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-51663 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-51663. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-51663 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-51663 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.