GHSA-5gpj-vj23-vhhv — open-webui
MEDIUMGHSA-5gpj-vj23-vhhv is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.3) CWE-863 vulnerability in open-webui. A fix is available for open-webui — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Open WebUI: Unapproved accounts can open terminal sessions via a WebSocket auth path missing the role check
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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-5gpj-vj23-vhhv.
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-5gpj-vj23-vhhv 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 376,715 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
open-webuiReal-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
Summary
The terminal WebSocket route authenticates its own first-message JWT instead of going through the HTTP dependency chain, and never applies the role check that get_verified_user enforces on every HTTP terminal route. An account whose role is pending, meaning registered but not approved, or approved and later deactivated back to pending, can therefore open an interactive terminal session that the HTTP terminal endpoints would refuse. The missing control is the verified-user role gate, not the terminal access grants, which are evaluated correctly.
Preconditions
At least one terminal server must be configured, which is off by default, and its access grants must cover the account: either public read (principal_id: "*") or a group the account still belongs to. The attacker needs a valid, unexpired JWT for a pending account and the terminal server id. Both are obtainable by an account that registered while approvals are pending, or by one that held access and was deactivated, since deactivation sets the role to pending without revoking the token, which lasts four weeks by default. Deployments with no terminal server configured, or whose terminal grants are admin-only, are not affected.
Impact
A deployment loses the account-approval boundary for terminal access. An unapproved or deactivated account gets interactive shell access, file browsing and terminal-backed tooling in the terminal environment, for as long as its token remains valid. Because the HTTP terminal routes correctly reject the same account, the two planes disagree, so an administrator who deactivates a user sees access revoked over HTTP while the WebSocket keeps working. The terminal access grants themselves are not bypassed: an account with no grant is still refused, so this only widens access to terminals already shared broadly or with a group the account remains in.
Fix
Fixed in v0.11.0 by https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/27537. Token decoding, revocation checking, user lookup and the role check are consolidated into a single get_verified_user_by_token helper, and both the terminal WebSocket route and the Socket.IO handshake now go through it. The role set lives in one constant shared with the HTTP gate so the two cannot drift apart again. Upgrading fully resolves the issue; no configuration change is required.
Root cause
Affected component: backend/open_webui/routers/terminals.py, the _resolve_authenticated_connection helper backing the /{server_id}/api/terminals/{session_id} WebSocket route. Affected setup: every build from v0.8.8 onward, since the route was introduced there.
WebSocket handshakes cannot use FastAPI dependencies, so this route reimplemented authentication inline. The reimplementation reproduced the parts that are visible in the token, that it decodes and that the user row exists, and silently dropped the part that lives in the database row, the role check. Authorization then ran on two independent code paths with no shared definition of what an authenticated user is, and only one of them was updated when the role gate was introduced.
Credits
Reported by @rexpository.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | open-webui | ≥ 0.8.8&&< 0.11.0 | 0.11.0pip install --upgrade 'open-webui==0.11.0' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for open-webui, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update open-webui to 0.11.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-5gpj-vj23-vhhv 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-5gpj-vj23-vhhv can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-5gpj-vj23-vhhv. 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-5gpj-vj23-vhhv in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-5gpj-vj23-vhhv across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.