ory oathkeeper up to 26.1.x authorization

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in ory oathkeeper up to 26.1.x and classified as critical. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown functionality. Such manipulation leads to authorization. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-33495. The attack can be launched remotely. No exploit exists. It is suggested to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in ory oathkeeper up to 26.1.x. It has been rated as critical. Affected by this issue is an unknown code. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a authorization vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-862. The product does not perform an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

ORY Oathkeeper is an Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) and Access Control Decision API that authorizes HTTP requests based on sets of Access Rules. Ory Oathkeeper is often deployed behind other components like CDNs, WAFs, or reverse proxies. Depending on the setup, another component might forward the request to the Oathkeeper proxy with a different protocol (http vs. https) than the original request. In order to properly match the request against the configured rules, Oathkeeper considers the `X-Forwarded-Proto` header when evaluating rules. The configuration option `serve.proxy.trust_forwarded_headers` (defaults to false) governs whether this and other `X-Forwarded-*` headers should be trusted. Prior to version 26.2.0, Oathkeeper did not properly respect this configuration, and would always consider the `X-Forwarded-Proto` header. In order for an attacker to abuse this, an installation of Ory Oathkeeper needs to have distinct rules for HTTP and HTTPS requests. Also, the attacker needs to be able to trigger one but not the other rule. In this scenario, the attacker can send the same request but with the `X-Forwarded-Proto` header in order to trigger the other rule. We do not expect many configurations to meet these preconditions. Version 26.2.0 contains a patch. Ory Oathkeeper will correctly respect the `serve.proxy.trust_forwarded_headers` configuration going forward, thereby eliminating the attack scenario. We recommend upgrading to a fixed version even if the preconditions are not met. As an additional mitigation, it is generally recommended to drop any unexpected headers as early as possible when a request is handled, e.g. in the WAF.

The advisory is shared for download at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-33495 since 03/20/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. There are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available.

Upgrading to version 26.2.0 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• ory

Name

• oathkeeper

Version

• 26.0
• 26.1

Website

• Product: https://github.com/ory/oathkeeper/

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