Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability · GHSA-97xr-jchp-xm3c

Directus public WebSocket clients gain unrestricted item access after a failed auth message

Published Aug 5, 2026 · catalog updated Aug 5, 2026 · Directus public WebSocket clients

Last checked Nov 1, 2026. A connected source was read within the last 7 days.

Open the advisory

Exploitation likelihood is not on this record for GHSA-97xr-jchp-xm3c. A missing EPSS score is not a low risk. Compare Directus public WebSocket clients with the linked advisory before you change production.

Severity

Critical—

Known exploitation

Not in CISA/VulnCheck KEV

EPSS

Awaiting synchronization with FIRST

Remediation

Version ranges on file

Affected products

npm directus

# Summary When a Directus instance is configured for public WebSocket REST access, a failed message on an already connected socket replaces the client's public accountability with a null accountability and leaves the connection open. Null accountability is the state Directus reserves for trusted internal calls, and the service layer skips permission evaluation entirely when it is present. Every subsequent message on that socket is therefore executed with no authorization check. The result is that failing authentication grants more access than succeeding at it. An unauthenticated attacker who can reach the public WebSocket endpoint can deliberately submit an invalid token and then read, create, update, or delete records in any user-defined collection, regardless of the permissions granted to the public role. # Details The WebSocket handler passes the connected client's accountability directly into . only calls its access validation when an accountability object is present, so a null value bypasses the check rather than denying it. Deletion by query is the highest impact action reachable this way, because a single attacker-supplied filter can select every row in a collection and Directus applies no batch mutation limit by default. The same accountability transition also occurred when a public-mode client's access token expired without a successful re-authentication, so the vulnerable state is reachable without submitting a deliberately invalid token. Directus system collections are rejected by the handler before the service call, so users, sessions, tokens, permissions, and other data are not reachable through this path. Impact is confined to user-defined collections. # Impact Confidentiality, integrity, and availability of user-defined collection data are all affected. An unauthenticated network attacker gains unrestricted read and write access to that data, and can destroy arbitrary amounts of it in a single request. Configured query limits and reduce the blast radi