Compliance Impact

This vulnerability allows any authenticated user to access sensitive personal data of other users without proper authorization, resulting in a full data breach of all records in the system.

Such unauthorized access and data breaches can lead to non-compliance with common data protection standards and regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, which require strict access controls and protection of personal and sensitive information.

Failure to enforce object-level authorization and prevent horizontal privilege escalation increases the risk of violating these regulations, potentially resulting in legal penalties, reputational damage, and loss of user trust.

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Executive Summary

CVE-2026-38568 is an Incorrect Access Control vulnerability in HireFlow Interview Management System v1.2. The application fails to enforce proper authorization checks on the /candidate/<id> and /interview/<id> endpoints. This means that any authenticated user can access candidate profiles and interview notes belonging to other users by simply changing the integer ID in the URL.

Because the IDs are sequential and start from 1, an attacker does not need to guess or brute force IDs to access unauthorized data. This results in horizontal privilege escalation and a full data breach of all records in the system.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability allows any authenticated user to access sensitive data of other users without authorization. This includes candidate profiles and interview notes, which may contain personal and confidential information.

The impact is a complete data breach of all records in the system, leading to loss of confidentiality and potential misuse of sensitive information.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability can be detected by attempting to access candidate profiles or interview notes of other users by manipulating the integer ID in the URL path while authenticated.

For example, an authenticated user can try accessing endpoints like /candidate/1 or /interview/2 and then increment or decrement the ID to see if unauthorized data is accessible.

Commands or methods to detect this include using tools like curl or a web browser to manually test URL paths with different IDs.

• curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" https://<hireflow-domain>/candidate/1
• curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" https://<hireflow-domain>/candidate/2
• curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" https://<hireflow-domain>/interview/1
• curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" https://<hireflow-domain>/interview/2

If these requests return data for IDs that do not belong to the authenticated user, it confirms the presence of the vulnerability.

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Mitigation Strategies

Immediate mitigation steps include implementing ownership verification checks in the candidate_detail() and interview_detail() functions to ensure that the record's owner_id matches the current user's ID.

If the user is not authorized to access the record, the system should return an HTTP 403 Forbidden response.

Additionally, implementing role-based access control (RBAC) to restrict access to admin-level users can help prevent unauthorized data access.

Upgrading to HireFlow version 1.3, which includes a patch for this vulnerability, is strongly recommended.

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