Missing Authorization in Actual Finance App

Compliance Impact

The provided information does not explicitly address how CVE-2026-50007 impacts compliance with common standards and regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.

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Executive Summary

This vulnerability exists in the Actual personal finance application prior to version 26.7.0. It is caused by a missing authorization check that allows a shared user with user_access on a budget file to perform actions that should be restricted to the file owner or an administrator.

Specifically, a non-owner shared user can call file-management endpoints such as /delete-user-file, /reset-user-file, and /user-create-key. This happens because the system treats ordinary shared access as sufficient for these sensitive file-management operations, which should require higher privileges.

The issue was fixed in version 26.7.0.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can impact you by allowing shared users who should have limited access to perform critical file management actions that are intended only for the file owner or administrators.

• Unauthorized deletion of user files.
• Resetting user files without proper permission.
• Creating user keys without authorization.

Such unauthorized actions can lead to data loss, unauthorized access, or compromise of the integrity of your financial data.

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Mitigation Strategies

To mitigate this vulnerability, you should upgrade the Actual personal finance application to version 26.7.0 or later, where the missing authorization issue has been fixed.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability involves unauthorized access to owner-only file management endpoints by users with shared access privileges. Detection involves monitoring or testing calls to the affected endpoints: /delete-user-file, /reset-user-file, and /user-create-key.

To detect exploitation attempts on your system or network, you can look for HTTP requests made by non-owner users to these endpoints. For example, monitoring logs for POST requests to these endpoints from users who should not have owner-level permissions can indicate potential abuse.

Suggested commands to detect such activity include searching server logs for suspicious requests. For example, using grep on server access logs:

• grep -iE 'POST /delete-user-file|POST /reset-user-file|POST /user-create-key' /path/to/access.log

Additionally, you can verify user permissions in your application database or access control system to ensure that only owners or administrators have access to these endpoints.

Testing can also be performed by attempting to call these endpoints as a shared user with user_access privileges and verifying that the server returns a 403 Forbidden response, indicating proper authorization enforcement.

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