🛡️ CVE-2020-5205 — pow

⚪ Unknown ✅ No Known Exploit CWE-384 OSV
N/A
CVSS Score
0 Low4 Medium7 High9 Critical10

Description

Session fixation

Impact

The use of Plug.Session in Pow.Plug.Session is susceptible to session fixation attacks if a persistent session store is used for Plug.Session, such as Redis or a database. Cookie store, which is used in most Phoenix apps, doesn't have this vulnerability.

Workarounds

Call Plug.Conn.configure_session(conn, renew: true) periodically and after privilege change. A custom authorization plug can be written where the create/3 method should return the conn only after Plug.Conn.configure_session/2 have been called on it.

References

https://github.com/danschultzer/pow/commit/578ffd3d8bb8e8a26077b644222186b108da474f

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Session_fixation

How this vulnerability can be exploited

This issue can be reached over the network, attack complexity is high, an attacker needs low-level privileges on the target. A user must be tricked into taking some action. The scope is changed, meaning a successful attack can affect components beyond the vulnerable one. Rated impact: confidentiality high, integrity low, availability none.

Weakness class

CVE-2020-5205 is classified as CWE-384: Session Fixation. A session identifier is not renewed at login, so an identifier planted beforehand becomes an authenticated session.

Affected software

CVE-2020-5205 is recorded against 1 package.

  • pow

Timeline and source

Published on 12 April 2022 and last revised on 8 July 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. Record sourced from OSV.

References

github.com (Web)
nvd.nist.gov (Advisory)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Package)
github.com (Web)

Details

Severity Unknown
CVSS Score N/A
CVSS Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N
CWE CWE-384
Public Exploit ✅ No
Source OSV
Published 2022-04-12
Updated 2026-08-12
Modified 2026-07-08
Fix URL N/A

Affected Packages

Software From version Fixed in
pow — —

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