Overview
CVE-2025-66385 is a critical privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Cerebrate versions prior to 1.30. This flaw allows authenticated, non-privileged users to elevate their privileges to higher roles, potentially including administrator, by exploiting the user-edit endpoint. This poses a significant risk to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Cerebrate instances.
Technical Details
The vulnerability resides in the UsersController::edit function within Cerebrate. An authenticated user can manipulate the role_id or organisation_id fields in the edit request. Due to insufficient validation or authorization checks, the system permits the modification of these fields, effectively granting the user a higher role or placing them in a different organization, thus escalating their privileges. This means a low-level user could potentially assign themselves administrative rights.
CVSS Analysis
Currently, the CVSS score is N/A. However, given the nature of the vulnerability as a direct privilege escalation, a high CVSS score is anticipated upon analysis. A successful exploit could lead to complete control of the Cerebrate instance by a malicious actor.
Possible Impact
The impact of CVE-2025-66385 is severe:
- Complete System Compromise: Attackers can gain full administrative control of the Cerebrate instance.
- Data Breach: Unauthorized access to sensitive data stored within Cerebrate.
- Data Manipulation: Modification or deletion of critical data.
- Service Disruption: Attackers can disable or disrupt the Cerebrate service, impacting operations.
- Lateral Movement: Depending on the Cerebrate instance’s integration with other systems, attackers may be able to use the compromised Cerebrate instance to pivot to other systems on the network.
Mitigation and Patch Steps
The primary mitigation is to upgrade to Cerebrate version 1.30 or later. The patch includes improved validation and authorization checks within the UsersController::edit function to prevent unauthorized modification of role or organization assignments. Specifically, commit c9bfa90abc85d4a20a9cc2f282959b72bef829bb addresses the issue. It is strongly recommended to apply this update as soon as possible.
Workaround: If upgrading is not immediately possible, you can implement a temporary workaround by restricting access to the user-edit endpoint through web server configuration or by implementing custom authentication and authorization checks. However, this workaround is not a substitute for applying the official patch.