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Incorrect Authorization

CVE-2026-42571

High
9/10

Summary

On April 2nd, 2026, a Claude coding agent alerted Pelican PI Brian Bockelman to a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Pelican's Web User Interface (WebUI) for various versions between `v7.21` and `v7.24`. Upon further investigation, the Pelican team discovered this attack allows any user authenticated to the WebUI via OAuth to gain admin privileges under certain configurations. These may include servers with the following configuration variables enabled: `Server.UIAdminUsers`: Affected if any of the listed admin users or the default admin account have not previously logged in to the server. `Server.AdminGroups`: Affected if `Issuer.GroupSource` is set to internal and an admin of the group has not previously logged in to the server. This issue affects github.com/pelicanplatform/pelican versions prior to 7.26.0-rc.0.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • LOW

CWE-863 - Incorrect Authorization

Authorization is a security mechanism performed by an application to grant or deny access to the requested resources by verifying the privileges of the user. When an application lacks effective authorization mechanisms, it enables unauthorized users to gain unintended privileges and illegitimate access to resources. Such a vulnerability may result in exposure of sensitive information, denial of service, arbitrary code execution, and complete system takeover.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published