GHSA-49f7-whx5-4256 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.1) Missing Authentication vulnerability in cognee. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-49f7-whx5-4256 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Cognee allows non-superusers to overwrite global LLM configuration
Real-World Exposure
cogneeReal-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
Cognee before 1.2.0 contains an improper access control vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to overwrite the global LLM provider configuration by self-registering an account and calling the settings endpoint, which performs no admin or superuser check. Attackers can redirect all LLM operations instance-wide to an attacker-controlled endpoint by exploiting the process-wide singleton configuration cache, enabling exfiltration of prompts, uploaded documents, extracted entities, and knowledge graph content from all users.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | cognee | all versions | 1.5.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for cognee. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update cognee to 1.5.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-49f7-whx5-4256 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 pinpoints whether GHSA-49f7-whx5-4256 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-49f7-whx5-4256. 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-49f7-whx5-4256 in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-49f7-whx5-4256 across PyPI dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.