GHSA-hjfh-p8f5-24wr is a high-severity (CVSS 7.2) CWE-862 vulnerability in ethyca-fides. A fix is available for ethyca-fides — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Fides Webserver API is Vulnerable to OAuth Client Privilege Escalation
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-hjfh-p8f5-24wr.
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-hjfh-p8f5-24wr 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 379,145 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
ethyca-fidesReal-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 OAuth client creation and update endpoints of the Fides Webserver API do not properly authorize scope assignment. This allows highly privileged users with client:create or client:update permissions to escalate their privileges to owner-level.
Details
When creating or updating OAuth clients, the API validates only that requested scopes exist in the system registry. It does not verify that the requester already possesses the scopes they are assigning, allowing these users to assign arbitrary scopes to OAuth clients.
Impact
This allows contributor-level users to escalate to owner-equivalent privileges, gaining access to user management, system configuration, and permission assignment capabilities they should not possess.
Patches
The vulnerability has been patched in Fides version 2.69.1. Users are advised to upgrade to this version or later to secure their systems against this threat.
Workarounds
There are no workarounds.
Risk Level
This vulnerability has been assigned a severity of HIGH. Contributor users are already highly privileged, only a handful of scopes are not already available to them, but these scopes can be abused for high impact.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | ethyca-fides | all versions | 2.69.1pip install --upgrade 'ethyca-fides==2.69.1' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for ethyca-fides, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update ethyca-fides to 2.69.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-hjfh-p8f5-24wr 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.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like GHSA-hjfh-p8f5-24wr can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-hjfh-p8f5-24wr. 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-hjfh-p8f5-24wr in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-hjfh-p8f5-24wr across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.