SpiceDB WriteRelationships fails silently if payload is too bigGHSA-pm3x-jrhh-qcr7
MEDIUMFix: authzed/spicedb@d0cd103GHSA-pm3x-jrhh-qcr7 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) CWE-770 vulnerability in github.com/authzed/spicedb. A fix is available for github.com/authzed/spicedb — see the affected versions and patch details below.
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-pm3x-jrhh-qcr7.
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
github.com/authzed/spicedbReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
SpiceDB is an open source database system for creating and managing security-critical application permissions. In versions prior to 1.45.2, users who use the exclusion operator somewhere in their authorization schema; have configured their SpiceDB server such that --write-relationships-max-updates-per-call is bigger than 6500; and issue calls to WriteRelationships with a large enough number of updates that cause the payload to be bigger than what their datastore allows; will receive a successful response from their WriteRelationships call, when in reality that call failed, and receive incorrect permission check results, if those relationships had to be read to resolve the relation involving the exclusion. Version 1.45.2 contains a patch for the issue. As a workaround, set --write-relationships-max-updates-per-call to 1000.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/authzed/spicedb | all versions | 1.45.2go get github.com/authzed/spicedb@v1.45.2 |
Affected Products
spicedbauthzedDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/authzed/spicedb, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/authzed/spicedb to 1.45.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-pm3x-jrhh-qcr7 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.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
This issue is rated Moderate severity, because it affects the behavior of a network-facing API: an attacker or misconfigured client can send an oversized WriteRelationships payload that is silently ignored by the server. The primary impact is to integrity, as expected relationship updates may not be written, with a…
~~~ Set--write-relationships-max-updates-per-call to 1000. ~~~Source: Red Hat security advisory for GHSA-pm3x-jrhh-qcr7 (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-pm3x-jrhh-qcr7 in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.