SurrealDB has an Uncaught Exception Handling Nonexistent RoleGHSA-jc55-246c-r88f
MEDIUMFix: surrealdb/surrealdb#5079GHSA-jc55-246c-r88f is a medium-severity (CVSS 4.9) CWE-248 vulnerability in surrealdb. A fix is available for surrealdb — see the affected versions and patch details below.
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-jc55-246c-r88f.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
surrealdb🦀surrealdb-coreReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Roles for system users are stored as generic Ident values and converted as strings and into the Role enum whenever IAM operations are to be performed that require processing the user roles. This conversion expects those identifiers to only contain the values owner, editor and viewer and will return an error otherwise. However, the unwrap() method would be called on this result when implementing std::convert::From<&Ident> for Role, which would result in a panic where a nonexistent role was used.
Impact
A privileged user with the owner role at any level in SurrealDB would be able to define a user with DEFINE USER with an nonexistent role, which would panic when being converted to a Role enum in order to perform certain IAM operations with that user. These operations included signing in with the user. This would crash the server, leading to denial of service.
Patches
Unexistent roles are no longer accepted during parsing when defining a user. Even when successfully associated with a user, referencing unexistent roles will no longer result in a panic and will instead throw an InvalidRole error.
- Version 2.1.0 and later are not affected by this issue.
Workarounds
Affected users who are unable to update may want to limit access to users with the owner role at any level to trusted parties only. To limit the impact of the denial of service, SurrealDB administrators may also want to ensure that the SurrealDB process is running so that it can be automatically re-started after a crash.
Resourcess
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | surrealdb | all versions | 2.1.0cargo update -p surrealdb --precise 2.1.0 |
| 🦀crates.io | surrealdb-core | all versions | 2.1.0cargo update -p surrealdb-core --precise 2.1.0 |
Affected Products
surrealdbsurrealdbDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for surrealdb, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update surrealdb to 2.1.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-jc55-246c-r88f is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-jc55-246c-r88f in your dependencies?
Find it across crates.io, including transitive dependencies.