CVE-2026-49301 in HarmonyOS
Summary
by MITRE • 08/17/2026
Permission control vulnerability in the Gallery module. Impact: Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may affect service confidentiality.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 08/17/2026
The identified security flaw resides within the Gallery module of the application, specifically concerning its permission control mechanisms. This type of vulnerability is fundamentally categorized under CWE-269, which denotes Improper Privilege Control, and often manifests as a form of Insecure Direct Object Reference (CWE-639) when users can access resources they are not authorized to view by manipulating input parameters or session states. The core technical issue involves the application failing to adequately verify whether the authenticated user possesses the necessary privileges before granting access to specific gallery assets, such as images, videos, or metadata stored within private directories. This oversight allows an attacker who has valid credentials for a lower-privilege account, or potentially even unauthenticated users if session management is also flawed, to bypass intended restrictions and retrieve sensitive data that should remain confidential.
From an operational perspective, the exploitation of this vulnerability directly compromises the confidentiality aspect of the CIA triad. An adversary can systematically enumerate gallery contents by iterating through object identifiers or directory paths, extracting proprietary images, personal photographs, or internal documentation without authorization. This exposure not only violates user privacy expectations but may also lead to significant business impact if intellectual property or sensitive corporate communications are leaked. The attack vector typically involves crafting HTTP requests with modified parameters that point to restricted resources, exploiting the lack of server-side validation checks on resource ownership and access rights.
This behavior aligns closely with MITRE ATT&CK technique T1078, Valid Accounts, where an attacker uses legitimate credentials to gain unauthorized access to specific data segments due to poor segmentation or permission enforcement. It also relates to T1530, Data from Local System, if the gallery contains locally stored files that are improperly exposed via web interfaces. The absence of robust authorization checks means that the application relies on implicit trust rather than explicit verification, a common anti-pattern in legacy codebases where access control logic is scattered or inconsistently applied across different modules.
To mitigate this vulnerability, developers must implement strict server-side access controls for all gallery resources. This involves ensuring that every request to retrieve an asset from the Gallery module undergoes a rigorous authorization check against the current user’s role and ownership permissions before any data is served. Implementing principle of least privilege ensures that users can only interact with objects explicitly assigned to them or publicly shared according to defined policies. Additionally, employing indirect object references rather than predictable sequential identifiers for gallery items can reduce the ease of enumeration attacks, although this should not replace proper authorization checks. Regular security audits and static code analysis focused on access control logic are recommended to identify similar flaws across other modules within the application architecture.