LimeSurvey 7.3.0 REST Survey Patching Endpoint improper authorization

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability marked as critical has been reported in LimeSurvey 7.3.0. This impacts an unknown function of the component REST Survey Patching Endpoint. The manipulation leads to improper authorization. This vulnerability is listed as CVE-2026-97685. The attack may be initiated remotely. There is no available exploit.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in LimeSurvey 7.3.0 and classified as critical. This issue affects an unknown code of the component REST Survey Patching Endpoint. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a improper authorization vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-285. The product does not perform or incorrectly performs an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

An authenticated LimeSurvey Community Edition 7.3.0 user allowed to create surveys can use their own survey as an authorized context while supplying question or answer identifiers belonging to another user's survey. The REST survey-patching endpoint checks the attacker's permission against the survey ID in the request URL, but the vulnerable persistence operations resolve the target object independently by its global qid or aid and never verify that it belongs to that authorized survey.

The advisory is shared at fluidattacks.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-97685 since 09/24/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be initiated remotely. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 09/29/2026). MITRE ATT&CK project uses the attack technique T1548.002 for this issue.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

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

Productinfo

Type

• Survey Software

Name

• LimeSurvey

Version

• 7.3.0

License

• open-source

CPE 2.3info

• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

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

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