GHSA-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.
SurrealDB has an Uncaught Exception Handling Nonexistent Role
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
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-jc55-246c-r88f 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 378,156 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
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 |
Detection & 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
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-jc55-246c-r88f can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-jc55-246c-r88f. 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-jc55-246c-r88f in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-jc55-246c-r88f across crates.io dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.