CVE-2025-53889 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Improper Authentication vulnerability in directus. A fix is available for directus — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Directus missing permission checks for manual trigger Flows
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.
- 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-2025-53889.
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.
directusnpmDescription
Directus is a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content. Starting in version 9.12.0 and prior to version 11.9.0, Directus Flows with a manual trigger are not validating whether the user triggering the Flow has permissions to the items provided as payload to the Flow. Depending on what the Flow is set up to do this can lead to the Flow executing potential tasks on the attacker's behalf without authenticating. Bad actors could execute the manual trigger Flows without authentication, or access rights to the said collection(s) or item(s). Users with manual trigger Flows configured are impacted as these endpoints do not currently validate if the user has read access to directus_flows or to the relevant collection/items. The manual trigger Flows should have tighter security requirements as compared to webhook Flows where users are expected to perform do their own checks. Version 11.9.0 fixes the issue. As a workaround, implement permission checks for read access to Flows and read access to relevant collection/items.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | directus | all versions | 11.9.0npm install directus@11.9.0 |
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 11.9.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-53889 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Put an independent control in front of the weakness: restrict the affected endpoint or interface to trusted networks, require an additional authentication factor or proxy-level check, and invalidate existing sessions and credentials in case the flaw has already been used.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-53889 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.