GHSA-jxc9-xmc4-gr23 is a medium-severity (CVSS 4.3) CWE-639 vulnerability in open-webui. A fix is available for open-webui — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Open WebUI: Deletion of directories and file embeddings in other knowledge bases via sync cleanup
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-jxc9-xmc4-gr23.
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-jxc9-xmc4-gr23 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
A user with write access to one knowledge base could delete directories, and drop file embeddings, belonging to knowledge bases they do not control. The sync cleanup endpoint verified write access on the knowledge base named in the URL and then acted on the directory and file ids supplied in the request body without checking that those objects belonged to that knowledge base.
Preconditions
Default configuration, no flags involved. The attacker needs write access to at least one knowledge base, which comes from owning one, from a write access grant, or from the admin role; workspace.knowledge is off by default, so an ordinary user cannot simply create one. They also need the victim's directory or file id, which are UUIDs and are not enumerable, so in practice the attacker is someone who can already see the target knowledge base, typically a read-only collaborator on a shared one. Deployments where no knowledge base is shared beyond its owner are not reachable.
Impact
The attacker deletes a target directory and, because the deletion runs without moving files to the parent, the knowledge_file associations for every file in that subtree are removed as well, so those documents silently drop out of the victim's knowledge base and out of its retrieval results. Separately, the per-file vector cleanup dropped the standalone file-<id> collection for any file id, breaking chat-with-file for that document. The stored files and their database rows survive, since that path was gated on file ownership, and an owner can restore the state by re-adding and reprocessing. Nothing about the target knowledge base's contents is disclosed to the attacker.
Fix
Fixed in https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/26722. Both request-body loops are now scoped to the knowledge base in the URL: a directory is resolved and skipped unless its knowledge_id matches, and the per-file vector cleanup runs only for files that are members of that knowledge base. Upgrading fully resolves the issue.
Root cause
Affected component: backend/open_webui/routers/knowledge.py, handler sync_knowledge_cleanup, endpoint POST /api/v1/knowledge/{id}/sync/cleanup. Affected setup: all builds from 0.9.6 onward, no optional dependency involved.
The handler treated the write-access check on the URL knowledge base as authorization for everything it went on to do, but the objects it acted on came from the request body and were addressed by primary key alone. Directory deletion at the model layer deletes by directory id and has no notion of a parent knowledge base, so the only thing that could have bound the two together was a membership check in the handler, and there was none. The explicit directory-delete endpoint in the same router already carried that check, which is what makes this a gap in one handler rather than a missing model-layer control.
Credits
Reported by @whyiug.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | open-webui | ≥ 0.9.6&&< 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-jxc9-xmc4-gr23 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-jxc9-xmc4-gr23 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-jxc9-xmc4-gr23. 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-jxc9-xmc4-gr23 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-jxc9-xmc4-gr23 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.