CVE-2026-105652 in Ghost
Summary
by MITRE • 10/06/2026
Ghost is a Node.js content management system. From 0.7.2 until 6.64.0, any staff-level user was able to determine the relative ordering of other staff users' hashed passwords. This does not directly disclose password hashes, and does not provide a practical path to recovering a password. This issue is fixed in version 6.64.0.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/06/2026
The vulnerability identified within Ghost versions ranging from 0.7.2 through 6.64.0 represents a significant information disclosure flaw rooted in the application's user management and authentication subsystems. As an open-source content management system widely used for publishing, Ghost relies on robust access controls to protect administrative functions. However, during this period, the implementation of password verification logic contained a timing side-channel that allowed authenticated staff-level users to infer sensitive security attributes about other accounts within the same instance. This flaw does not involve direct theft of data but rather exploits the temporal differences in how the system processes authentication requests against different user credentials.
The technical mechanism behind this vulnerability is characteristic of a classic timing attack, which falls under the CWE-208 classification for Observable Timing Discrepancies. In secure cryptographic implementations, password hashing and comparison operations should execute in constant time to prevent attackers from deducing information based on how long an operation takes. When comparing a provided password against stored hashes, many systems iterate through characters or perform hash computations sequentially. If the system short-circuits upon finding a mismatching character rather than continuing to process the entire string, it creates a measurable difference in response time. An attacker with staff-level access could send multiple authentication requests and measure the latency of each request. By statistically analyzing these latencies, they can determine which characters are correct for other users' passwords because matching prefixes cause slightly longer processing times before the system rejects the attempt as invalid.
While this vulnerability does not directly expose password hashes or provide an immediate path to account takeover through brute force in a practical sense, it significantly weakens the security posture of the platform by enabling relative ordering and partial character inference. The ability to determine the relative ordering of hashed passwords implies that an attacker could potentially narrow down the search space for dictionary attacks or rainbow table lookups if they had access to additional metadata or if the hashing algorithm was known to have specific properties. More critically, this information leakage violates the principle of least privilege and undermines trust among administrative users who expect their credentials to remain confidential even from other staff members with elevated but not root-level permissions.
From a threat modeling perspective aligned with MITRE ATT&CK frameworks, this behavior aligns with techniques related to Credential Access via Input Signal Manipulation or potentially Discovery if used to map out user privilege levels based on response patterns. The impact is primarily confined to the confidentiality of authentication secrets within the specific Ghost instance. It does not compromise external systems but creates an internal vector for lateral movement or privilege escalation if combined with other vulnerabilities, such as weak password policies that make brute-forcing feasible once partial information is obtained.
The issue was addressed in version 6.64.0 by implementing constant-time comparison algorithms and ensuring that authentication logic does not leak timing data based on the position of matching characters. To mitigate similar risks in legacy systems or custom implementations, developers must ensure that all cryptographic comparisons use libraries designed to resist side-channel attacks. Additionally, organizations should enforce strict role-based access controls (RBAC) so that staff-level users do not have unnecessary privileges over other administrative accounts unless explicitly required for their job functions. Regular security audits and penetration testing focusing on timing analysis can help identify such vulnerabilities before they are exploited in production environments.