Directus up to 11.8.x improper authentication

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as critical has been found in Directus up to 11.8.x. This vulnerability affects unknown code. The manipulation leads to improper authentication. This vulnerability is referenced as CVE-2025-53889. Remote exploitation of the attack is possible. No exploit is available. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Directus up to 11.8.x. It has been rated as critical. This issue affects some unknown processing. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a improper authentication vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-287. When an actor claims to have a given identity, the product does not prove or insufficiently proves that the claim is correct. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

Directus is a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content. Starting in version 9.12.0 and prior to version 11.9.0, Directus Flows with a manual trigger are not validating whether the user triggering the Flow has permissions to the items provided as payload to the Flow. Depending on what the Flow is set up to do this can lead to the Flow executing potential tasks on the attacker's behalf without authenticating. Bad actors could execute the manual trigger Flows without authentication, or access rights to the said collection(s) or item(s). Users with manual trigger Flows configured are impacted as these endpoints do not currently validate if the user has read access to `directus_flows` or to the relevant collection/items. The manual trigger Flows should have tighter security requirements as compared to webhook Flows where users are expected to perform do their own checks. Version 11.9.0 fixes the issue. As a workaround, implement permission checks for read access to Flows and read access to relevant collection/items.

The advisory is shared at github.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2025-53889 since 07/11/2025. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be initiated remotely. No form of authentication is needed for a successful exploitation. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available.

Upgrading to version 11.9.0 eliminates this vulnerability. The upgrade is hosted for download at github.com. Applying the patch 22be460c76957708d67fdd52846a9ad1cbb083fb is able to eliminate this problem. The bugfix is ready for download at github.com. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Name

• Directus

Version

• 11.0
• 11.1
• 11.2
• 11.3
• 11.4
• 11.5
• 11.6
• 11.7
• 11.8

License

• open-source

Website

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

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Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

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