Directus up to 11.1.1 authorization

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability has been found in Directus up to 11.1.1 and classified as critical. This vulnerability affects unknown code. This manipulation causes authorization. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2025-27089. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. There is no exploit available. The affected component should be upgraded.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability classified as critical was found in Directus up to 11.1.1. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown part. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a authorization vulnerability. The CWE definition for the vulnerability is CWE-863. The product performs an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action, but it does not correctly perform the check. This allows attackers to bypass intended access restrictions. As an impact it is known to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

Directus is a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content. In affected versions if there are two overlapping policies for the `update` action that allow access to different fields, instead of correctly checking access permissions against the item they apply for the user is allowed to update the superset of fields allowed by any of the policies. E.g. have one policy allowing update access to `field_a` if the `id == 1` and one policy allowing update access to `field_b` if the `id == 2`. The user with both these policies is allowed to update both `field_a` and `field_b` for the items with ids `1` and `2`. Before v11, if a user was allowed to update an item they were allowed to update the fields that the single permission, that applied to that item, listed. With overlapping permissions this isn't as clear cut anymore and the union of fields might not be the fields the user is allowed to update for that specific item. The solution that this PR introduces is to evaluate the permissions for each field that the user tries to update in the validateItemAccess DB query, instead of only verifying access to the item as a whole. This is done by, instead of returning the actual field value, returning a flag that indicates if the user has access to that field. This uses the same case/when mechanism that is used for stripping out non permitted field that is at the core of the permissions engine. As a result, for every item that the access is validated for, the expected result is an item that has either 1 or null for all the "requested" fields instead of any of the actual field values. These results are not useful for anything other than verifying the field level access permissions. The final check in validateItemAccess can either fail if the number of items does not match the number of items the access is checked for (ie. the user does not have access to the item at all) or if not all of the passed in fields have access permissions for any of the returned items. This is a vulnerability that allows update access to unintended fields, potentially impacting the password field for user accounts. This has been addressed in version 11.1.2 and all users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

It is possible to read the advisory at github.com. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2025-27089 since 02/18/2025. The exploitation appears to be easy. The attack can be launched remotely. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not publicly available.

Upgrading to version 11.1.2 eliminates this vulnerability. The upgrade is hosted for download at github.com.

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Productinfo

Name

• Directus

Version

• 11.1.0
• 11.1.1

Website

• Product: https://github.com/directus/directus/

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