Mastodon has a consent-check bypass in its remote Collections
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 4.6.0-beta.1
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- 1 proof of concept on GitHub
- Exploitation: none
- Automatable: yes
- Technical impact: partial
Summary
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. In versions there is a missing condition in the check if remote accounts consented to be featured in a remote Collection could lead to attackers bypassing the check and faking consent. An attacker could forge the FeatureAuthorization object that is used to verify consent to be featured in a Collection and thus make it appear as if an account is allowed to be in a Collection when it actually is not. While the FeatureAuthorization must reside on the same domain as the object it is for, a check is missing to make sure said object is actually the same as in the Collection item. This allows an attacker to forge the authorization. Mastodon servers are affected only if running the main branch or nightly builds who have opted into testing the experimental "Collections" feature by setting the environment variable EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES to a value including collections. This has been patched in version 4.6.0-beta.1.
Timeline
- CVE published
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- mastodon mastodon
From nightly.2026-03-10 · fixed in 4.6.0-beta.1