GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw 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 relies on OIDC email claims to verify the validity of a user's domain.
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 GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw.
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
GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw 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
Impact
All Hail Batch clusters are affected. An attacker is able to:
- Create one or more accounts with Hail Batch without corresponding real accounts in the organization.
For example, a user could create a Microsoft or Google account and then change their email to "[email protected]". This Microsoft or Google account can then be used to create a Hail Batch account in Hail Batch clusters whose organization domain is "example.org".
In Google, this attack is partially mitigated because Google requires users to verify ownership of their Google account. However, a valid user is able to create multiple distinct Hail Batch accounts by creating multiple distinct Google accounts using email addresses of the form "[email protected]".
In Microsoft, this attack requires Azure AD Administrator access to an Azure AD Tenant. The Azure AD Administrator is permitted to change the email address of an account to any other email address without verification. An attacker can create an Azure Tenant for free.
- The attacker does not have access to any private data (because the new service principals or service accounts are not granted any privileges).
- If trial Hail Batch billing projects are enabled, the attacker does have the ability to run jobs and thus spend money. An attacker can create as many accounts as Microsoft or Google permit.
- The attacker cannot impersonate another user because, in Azure, we use the
subfrom the OAuth2 response, and, in Google, Google does an email verification.
Remediation
- Apply this patch to prevent third-party attackers from creating accounts.
- Audit your users list https://auth.example.org/users for user accounts whose login ids are not valid login ids with your identity provider. Delete such users.
A forthcoming change will prevent users from creating multiple accounts using Google's + email redirection.
Workarounds
None.
References
- https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-oauth-is-broken-sort-of/
- https://www.descope.com/blog/post/noauth
- https://developers.google.com/identity/openid-connect/openid-connect#an-id-tokens-payload
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/access-token-claims-reference#payload-claims
[1] Hail Batch must separately stop using emails and start using the OAuth2 sub in Google. This is a known deficiency. In particular, if an email is re-used by the organization for a new user, the new user could access the old user's Hail Batch account.
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 GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw 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 GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-487p-qx68-5vjw across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.