CVE-2026-85216
Received Received - Intake

Authentication Bypass in MISP via LDAP and LinOTP

Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-85216, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.

Publication date: 2026-09-03

Last updated on: 2026-09-03

Assigner: CIRCL

Description

MISP contains an authentication bypass vulnerability in its LDAP and LinOTP authentication components due to insufficient validation of user-supplied credentials. The custom LdapAuthenticate and LinOTPAuthenticate components replace CakePHP's FormAuthenticate implementation but did not replicate its credential validation checks. As a result, empty or non-string values could reach the underlying authentication mechanisms. In the LDAP authentication path, an attacker able to identify a valid directory user's email address could submit an empty password. The empty credential could be passed to ldap_bind(), where an LDAP server accepting unauthenticated binds may return a successful result for a valid distinguished name combined with an empty password. MISP could consequently treat the attacker as the corresponding authenticated directory user without verification of the user's password. The issue also affected the LinOTP authentication component. Invalid credential types were not rejected before being processed, and when mixed authentication was enabled, an empty password could be checked against a locally stored MISP password hash. LDAP-provisioned MISP accounts could additionally be created with an empty local password because account creation skipped normal validation, resulting in a hash corresponding to an empty password. This could permit authentication through the local fallback mechanism when such an account was no longer resolved through LDAP. Successful exploitation could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to impersonate an existing MISP user. If the targeted account has administrative or other privileged permissions, the attacker could gain corresponding access to sensitive threat-intelligence data, modify or delete information, alter configuration, or perform other privileged operations. The patch resolves the vulnerability by requiring authentication identifiers and passwords to be valid strings, rejecting empty passwords where they are not explicitly permitted, and assigning a randomly generated local password to LDAP-provisioned accounts instead of storing a hash derived from an empty password.

CVSS Scores

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Meta Information

Published
2026-09-03
Last Modified
2026-09-03
Generated
2026-09-03
AI Q&A
2026-09-03
EPSS Evaluated
N/A
NVD
EUVD

Affected Vendors & Products

Showing 1 associated CPE
Vendor Product Version / Range
misp misp to 0.0.0 (inc)

Helpful Resources

Exploitability

CWE
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KEV
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CWE ID Description
CWE-521 The product does not require that users should have strong passwords.

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Executive Summary

MISP has an authentication bypass flaw in its LDAP and LinOTP authentication components. These components did not properly validate user credentials, allowing empty passwords or non-string values to bypass authentication. Attackers could exploit this by submitting an empty password for a known email address, potentially gaining access to the system as that user.

Impact Analysis

If exploited, an attacker could impersonate an existing MISP user, including administrators. This could lead to unauthorized access to sensitive threat-intelligence data, modification or deletion of information, configuration changes, or other privileged operations.

Mitigation Strategies

Apply the official patch from MISP that enforces valid string credentials and rejects empty passwords. Ensure LDAP-provisioned accounts have randomly generated local passwords instead of empty ones. Disable unauthenticated LDAP binds if possible and review user accounts for empty password hashes.

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