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CVE-2026-58593highCWE-290CWE-345

NodeBB - ActivityPub Author Spoofing via Unvalidated attributedTo Mapped to Local User

41Vexday Risk Score

No sign of exploitation. It has a public proof of concept.

ssvc Attendcvss 8.7epss 0.2%
exploitation probability
0.2%top 89% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
1 public exploit(s)
NodeBB does not bind the claimed author of an inbound ActivityPub object to the authenticated remote actor. The inbound middleware verifies the HTTP-signature actor and checks the origin of object.id, but never validates that attributedTo corresponds to the sender. In the object mock, attributedTo is used directly as a uid, and actors.assert silently ignores numeric identifiers (filtering them out without re-deriving the uid), so a federated remote actor can set attributedTo to a bare numeric value such as 1 and have the resulting post or private message created with that local uid as author, including the administrator account. This lets a remote attacker forge posts and direct messages attributed to arbitrary local users. Requires the ActivityPub/federation feature to be enabled.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
NodeBB · NodeBB
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