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GHSA-4v48-4q5m-8vx4

HighCVSS 7.2 / 10
Published Dec 5, 2022·Last modified Apr 15, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

Impact

Prometheus can be secured by a web.yml file that specifies usernames and hashed passwords for basic authentication.

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, which means that even if you have access to the hash, it is very hard to find the original password back.

However, a flaw in the way this mechanism was implemented in the exporter toolkit makes it possible with people who know the hashed password to authenticate against Prometheus.

A request can be forged by an attacker to poison the internal cache used to cache the computation of hashes and make subsequent requests successful. This cache is used in both happy and unhappy scenarios in order to limit side channel attacks that could tell an attacker if a user is present in the file or not.

Patches

Prometheus 2.37.4 (LTS) and 2.40.4 have been released to address this issue.

Workarounds

There is no workaround but attacker must have access to the hashed password, stored in disk, to bypass the authentication.

Credit

We want to thank Lei Wan for reporting this security issue.

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.2

The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker needs high-level or administrative privileges. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the confidentiality of the information. There is a high impact on the integrity of the data. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.

Threat Intelligence
6.6

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
N/A

Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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