GHSA-qw9g-7549-7wg5

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    GHSA-qw9g-7549-7wg5

    Published: 1 Mar 2024Last Modified: 10 Sept 2026

    Summary: Directus has MySQL accent insensitive email matching

    Details: ## Password reset vulnerable to accent confusion The password reset mechanism of the Directus backend is implemented in a way where combined with (specific, need to double check if i can work around) configuration in MySQL or MariaDB. As such, it allows attackers to receive a password reset email of a victim user, specifically having it arrive at a similar email address as the victim with a one or more characters changed to use accents. This is due to the fact that by default MySQL/MariaDB are configured for accent-insenstive and case-insensitve comparisons. MySQL weak comparison: ```sql select 1 from directus_users where '[email protected]' = 'julian@cüre53.de'; ``` This is exploitable due to an error in the API using the supplied email address for sending the reset password mail instead of using the email from the database. ### Steps to reproduce: 1. If the attacker knows the email address of the victim user, i.e., `[email protected]`. (possibly just the domain could be enough for an educated guess) 2. A off-by-one accented domain `cüre53.de` can be registered to be able to receive emails. 3. With this email the attacker can request a password reset for `julian@cüre53.de`. ```http POST /auth/password/request HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com [...] {"email":"julian@cüre53.de"} ``` 4. The supplied email (julian@cüre53.de) gets checked against the database and will match the non-accented email `[email protected]` and will continue to email the password reset link to the provided email address instead of the saved email address. 5. With this email the attacker can log into the target account and use it for nefarious things ### Workarounds Should be possible with collations but haven't been able to confirm this. ### References - https://www.monolune.com/articles/what-is-the-utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci-collation/ - https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-unicode-sets.html

    Affected packages

    Package

    Name: directus

    Purl: pkg:npm/directus

    Affected ranges

    Type: SEMVER

    Events:

    Introduced- 0
    Fixed -10.8.3

    Affected versions

    Common Vulnerability Scoring System

    Attack Vector
    Network
    Adjacent
    Local
    Physical
    Privileges Required
    None
    Low
    High
    User Interaction
    None
    Required
    Scope
    Unchanged
    Changed
    Confidentiality
    None
    Low
    High
    Integrity
    None
    Low
    High
    Availability
    None
    Low
    High
    GHSA-qw9g-7549-7wg5 | CVE-DB