Accepted emergency contact can bypass Ente recovery notice period
Key facts
- Attack vector
- Network
- Privileges required
- Low
- User interaction
- Required
- Attack complexity
- High
- Impact type
- Security bypass
- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
- High · High · High
- Fix status
- Fixed
Attack profile from CVSS 3.1 · CNA. Fix status from CNA. Impact type from CWE-639.
Summary
Ente before 0.1.18 and the ghcr.io/ente/server image before 2026.07.09 are affected. The approval endpoint for emergency contacts trusts a client-supplied user identifier, which lets an accepted emergency contact approve a recovery before the owner's notice period expires (CWE-639). An attacker needs a prior accepted emergency contact relationship with the victim. The same weak check on the reject and stop transitions can let a user who knows another recovery session UUID potentially cancel that session.
Written with Claude Haiku 5.5 from the sources below · 2026-10-29
Description from the CNA
Ente provides end-to-end encrypted cloud services and security tools. Prior to server image 2026.07.09, the POST /emergency-contacts/approve-recovery endpoint authorized approval using a client-supplied userID and updated an emergency recovery session using only its client-supplied recovery-session UUID. An accepted emergency contact could submit the contact's own identifier, transition the victim's session from WAITING to READY, clear wait_till, retrieve recovery information, and continue account recovery before the owner-configured notice period expired. Exploitation of the approval bypass required the victim to have previously added and accepted the attacker as an emergency contact, and it did not create recovery rights for an arbitrary account. Separately, the same insufficiently scoped update pattern affected the reject and stop recovery transitions, allowing a user who knew another recovery-session UUID to potentially cancel a session to which the user was not a party. This issue is fixed in server image 2026.07.09.
Why it matters now
SSVC decision points
CISA ADP · SSVC 2.0.3
- Exploitation
- Poc
- Automatable
- No
- Technical impact
- Total
The decision (Track, Attend, Act) also depends on your mission and well-being impact; see CISA's SSVC guide.
Affected products
Remediation
Update the ghcr.io/ente/server image to 2026.07.09 or later, which fixes this issue. The sources list no fixed version for ente.
Written with Claude Haiku 5.5 from the sources below · 2026-10-29
- Fix · CNA ente (ente) Fixed in 0.1.18
- Fix · CNA ghcr.io/ente/server (ente) Fixed in 2026.07.09
Timeline
- 2026-10-13 Threatist record created from CVE-2026-104875
- 2026-10-14 Priority changed: MEDIUM → LOW
- 2026-10-29 CISA SSVC decision points changed
- 2026-10-29 Priority changed: LOW → HIGH
References
Other 5
More ente vulnerabilities
- TI-2026-13948 Ente Museum Server Authorization Bypass Vulnerability CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 6.5
- TI-2026-51367 Ente: 2of3 cards v1 contain a checksum that enables offline guessing of low-entropy secrets CVSS 4.0MEDIUM 5.9
Sources
This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Sources and licences