CVE-2026-54740
Received
Received - Intake
Privilege Escalation in Lemmy via ActivityPub
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-54740, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-19
Last updated on: 2026-08-19
Assigner: GitHub, Inc.
Description
Description
Lemmy is a link aggregator and forum for the fediverse. Prior to 0.19.19 and 1.0.0-alpha.18, a lower-ranked remote moderator can remove a higher-ranked moderator by sending a signed ActivityPub Remove activity to the target instance. The local API uses LocalUser::is_higher_mod_or_admin_check to enforce moderator rank, but CollectionRemove::verify in crates/apub/activities/src/community/collection_remove.rs only calls verify_mod_action. CollectionRemove::receive dereferences self.object as an ApubPerson, creates a CommunityModeratorForm, and calls CommunityActions::leave without checking that the actor outranks the moderator identified by the object field. In communities with federated moderators, a junior moderator can therefore strip senior moderators from the community moderator list even though the local API rejects the same action. This issue is fixed in versions 0.19.19 and 1.0.0-alpha.18.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| lemmy | lemmy | to 0.19.19 (inc) |
| lemmy | lemmy | to 1.0.0-alpha.18 (inc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-862 | The product does not perform an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action. |
