CVE-2025-23208 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.3) Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in zotregistry.dev/zot. A fix is available for zotregistry.dev/zot — see the affected versions and patch details below.
IdP group membership revocation ignored in zot
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-2025-23208.
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
zotregistry.dev/zotReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Summary
The group data stored for users in the boltdb database (meta.db) is an append-list so group revocations/removals are ignored in the API.
Details
SetUserGroups is alled on login, but instead of replacing the group memberships, they are appended. This may be due to some conflict with the group definitions in the config file, but that wasn't obvious to me if it were the case.
PoC
Login with group claims, logout, remove the user from a group from at IdP and log in again, the API still grants access and the new list of groups is appended creating meaningless duplicate entries and no longer mathing the expected groups from the IdP. The behavior can be verified by seeing the API or UI still presenting images it should not or by viewing the data directly: bbolt get meta.db UserData <user>, eg:
Note this example also has duplicates due to group hierarchy changes that were left in the database.
Impact
Any Zot configuration that relies on group-based authorization will not respect group remove/revocation by an IdP.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | zotregistry.dev/zot | all versions | 2.1.2go get zotregistry.dev/zot@v2.1.2 |
Affected Products
zotzotregistryDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for zotregistry.dev/zot, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update zotregistry.dev/zot to 2.1.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-23208 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Close the privilege gap rather than the entry point: audit which accounts, roles and service identities can reach the affected operation, drop the component to the least privilege it actually needs, and review file and directory permissions created by earlier installs — a default left in place is what makes this reachable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-23208 in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.