GHSA-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p is a high-severity (CVSS 8.6) CWE-524 vulnerability in directus. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Directus: Authorization-dependent response served from unsegmented cache key
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 GHSA-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p.
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-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p 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 367,633 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
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
Summary
When response caching is enabled (CACHE_ENABLED=true), the cache-key derivation in api/src/utils/get-cache-key.ts includes only version, path, query, and accountability.user (plus a conditional ip). Authorization context beyond user (share, role, roles, admin, app, policies) is not part of the key.
For share tokens this is load-bearing. Directus's share-authentication flow (api/src/services/shares.ts:100-105) issues a JWT without an id claim, so api/src/utils/get-accountability-for-token.ts never assigns accountability.user, leaving it null (the default from create-default-accountability.ts). Every share token, and every anonymous request, therefore reduces to user: null in the cache-key input. Two different shares (or an anonymous request and a share token) requesting the same URL with the same query produce identical cache keys. The first request populates the bucket with a permission-filtered response; subsequent hits from unrelated shares or anonymous clients receive that payload without any permission re-evaluation.
This is the web-cache pattern "authorization-dependent response cached under an unsegmented key" (cache key collision / missing authorization context in cache key, CWE-524 and CWE-639). Two adjacent read populations collide:
- Share to share:
Share Apopulates the cache,Share BreadsShare A's scoped response. - Share to anonymous (and the reverse): any unauthenticated client hitting the same URL retrieves cached share-scoped data without presenting any token.
Affected
- Config required:
CACHE_ENABLED=true(any store: memory, redis, memcached) plus at least one activedirectus_sharesrow. This is not a default-on bug:CACHE_ENABLEDships asfalse. The cache is documented as a production performance setting, so operators who enable it are the ones affected.
Vulnerability class
- CWE-524: Use of Cache Containing Sensitive Information
- CWE-639: Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key (the key here is the derived cache key, not the URL)
- OWASP API3:2023: Broken Object Property Level Authorization
Impact
- Cross-share confidentiality breach. Any share's filtered response can be served to a holder of a different share token, or to an anonymous request, that hits the same URL and query. Shares are advertised as a mechanism to distribute scoped, read-only access to specific items; this bug makes every cached share response readable by any other share-token holder who can reach the URL (the item-detail admin UI uses a predictable pattern).
- Anonymous request can read share data. Anonymous requests also compute
user=null. An anonymous client hitting/items/articles?fields=*after a share request has populated the cache receives the share's scoped payload with zero authentication. - Password-protected share, derivative effect. Password protection lives only at
shares.login(JWT issuance). Once any share has populated the cache for a URL, an anonymous or alternate-share request to that URL retrieves the cached payload without exchanging the share password. This is the same cache-key collision surfacing as a password-protection bypass symptom, not a distinct mechanism. - Persistence. The leak persists for the
CACHE_TTLwindow (commonly 5 to 30 minutes).CACHE_AUTO_PURGEclears on mutating writes to cached collections but does not purge per-user or per-share. WithCACHE_STORE=redis(common in production) the poisoned bucket survives server restarts. - No write impact. The bypass is read-only.
Scope of the leak depends on the share's permission surface. A share with no backing role (directus_shares.role = null, the default) collapses visibility to the primary key, so the cache leaks only PKs. A share backed by a role with broader field access (the intended production setup for distributing useful content) leaks the full content that role can see on the scoped item.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | directus | all versions | 12.0.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for directus. 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 directus to 12.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p 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-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p 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-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p. 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-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-c6w9-5g5j-jh2p across npm dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.