CVE-2024-54151 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Information Exposure vulnerability in directus. A fix is available for directus — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Directus allows unauthenticated access to WebSocket events and operations
Exploitation Status
Proof-of-concept exploit code exists
- CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-54151.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
directusnpm@directus/apinpmDescription
Summary
When setting WEBSOCKETS_GRAPHQL_AUTH or WEBSOCKETS_REST_AUTH to "public", an unauthenticated user is able to do any of the supported operations (CRUD, subscriptions) with full admin privileges.
Details
Accountability for unauthenticated WebSocket requests is set to null, which used to be "public permissions" until the Permissions Policy update which now defaults that to system/admin level access. So instead of null we need to make use of createDefaultAccountability() to ensure public permissions are used for unauthenticated users.
PoC
- Start directus with
WEBSOCKETS_ENABLED=true
WEBSOCKETS_GRAPHQL_AUTH=public
WEBSOCKETS_REST_AUTH=public
- Subscribe using GQL or REST or do any CRUD operation on a user created collection (system tables are not reachable with crud)
subscription {
directus_users_mutated {
key
event
data {
id
email
first_name
last_name
password
}
}
}
or
{
"type": "items",
"action": "read",
"collection": "your_collection_name"
}
3a. Open up the data studio as any user. Observe how the subscriber gets notified on each page navigation (because the users last_page gets updated, the password fields is properly redacted here)
3b. Observe receiving all available items from the your_collection_name collection.
Impact
This impacts any Directus instance that has either WEBSOCKETS_GRAPHQL_AUTH or WEBSOCKETS_REST_AUTH set to public allowing unauthenticated users to subscribe for changes on any collection or do REST CRUD operations on user defined collections ignoring permissions.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | directus | ≥ 11.0.0&&< 11.3.0 | 11.3.0npm install directus@11.3.0 |
| 📦npm | @directus/api | ≥ 22.2.0&&< 23.2.0 | 23.2.0npm install @directus/api@23.2.0 |
Affected Products
directusmonospaceDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for directus, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update directus to 11.3.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-54151 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Assume what was exposed is already known: rotate any credential, token or key that the affected component could return, restrict the endpoint to callers that genuinely need it, and strip sensitive fields from responses and error output at the boundary rather than relying on the client not to read them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-54151 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.