GHSA-9x4q-3gxw-849f
JupyterHub has a privilege escalation vulnerability with the `admin:users` scope
Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| PyPI | jupyterhub | < 4.1.6 | 4.1.6 |
| PyPI | jupyterhub | >= 5.0.0, < 5.1.0 | 5.1.0 |
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
If a user is granted the `admin:users` scope, they may escalate their own privileges by making themselves a full admin user.
### Details
The `admin:users` scope allows a user to edit user records:
> admin:users
>
> Read, write, create and delete users and their authentication state, not including their servers or tokens.
>
> -- https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/rbac/scopes.html#available-scopes
However, this includes making users admins. Admin users are granted scopes beyond `admin:users` making this a mechanism by which granted scopes may be escalated.
### Impact
The impact is relatively small in that `admin:users` is already an extremely privileged scope only granted to trusted users.
In effect, `admin:users` is equivalent to `admin=True`, which is not intended.
Note that the change here only prevents escalation to the built-in JupyterHub admin role that has unrestricted permissions. It does not prevent users with e.g. `groups` permissions from granting themselves or other users permissions via group membership, which is intentional.
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.
- https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/security/advisories/GHSA-9x4q-3gxw-849f
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-41942
- https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/commit/99e2720b0fc626cbeeca3c6337f917fdacfaa428
- https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/commit/ff2db557a85b6980f90c3158634bf924063ab8ba
- https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub
- https://github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/jupyterhub/PYSEC-2024-200.yaml