Grav Vulnerable to Administrative Account Disruption and Privilege De-escalation via User Overwrite Logic
Summary
A business logic vulnerability in the Grav Admin Panel allows a low-privileged user (with only user creation permissions) to overwrite existing accounts, including the primary administrator. By creating a new user with a username that already exists, the system updates the existing account's metadata and permissions instead of rejecting the request. This leads to a Denial of Service (DoS) on administrative functions and Privilege De-escalation of the root account.
Details
The vulnerability stems from an insecure "Create or Update" logic within the user management module. When the admin-addon handles a user creation request, it does not strictly validate whether the username is already taken by a higher-privileged account. Instead of returning a "409 Conflict" or a validation error, the application logic proceeds to overwrite the existing user configuration file (e.g., user/accounts/root0.yaml) with the new, lower-privileged data provided by the attacker.
Because the attacker cannot assign higher permissions to themselves (due to existing fixes), the result is that the targeted account (the original Admin/Root) has its access levels wiped or replaced by the attacker's input, effectively locking the real administrator out of the system.
PoC
1. Log in as a Super User (e.g., root0) and create a low-privileged user (e.g., adminuser).
2. Assign adminuser the following specific permissions:
admin.login
admin.users.list
admin.users.read
admin.users.create
3. Log out and log back in as adminuser.
4. Navigate to User Accounts -> Add.
5. Fill in the form with the following details:
Username: root0 (The exact username of the Super User)
Email: [email protected]
Fullname: Fake Root0
7. Click Save.
8. Observe that the account is successfully "created".
9. The original administrative permissions are gone, and the account is now restricted.
PoC video
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/047cb44e-0279-402b-b4fb-12bf5d427a5e
Impact
This is a Privilege De-escalation and Account Disruption vulnerability.
Who is impacted: Any Grav installation where a non-admin user is granted permission to create other users.
Consequence: An attacker can effectively disable all administrative accounts on the platform, leading to a complete loss of management control over the CMS.
Maintainer note — fix applied (2026-04-24)
Fixed in Grav core on the 2.0 branch: commit [d904efc33](https://github.com/getgrav/grav/commit/d904efc33) — will ship in 2.0.0-beta.2.
What changed: UserObject::save already had a uniqueness guard (commit [19c2f8da7](https://github.com/getgrav/grav/commit/19c2f8da7), November 2025) that blocks the PoC. This release tightens that guard:
1. strpos($key, '@@') → str_contains($key, '@@'). The previous form was falsy when the transient-key marker was at position 0 (e.g. @@hash), silently bypassing the check. str_contains returns a proper boolean.
2. The instanceof FileStorage gate was dropped so the uniqueness check runs for any FlexStorageInterface backend — not just the default file-per-user YAML one.
A low-privileged user with admin.users.create can no longer disrupt a super-admin account by submitting that admin's username through the "add user" form.
Files:
- [
system/src/Grav/Common/Flex/Types/Users/UserObject.php](https://github.com/getgrav/grav/blob/2.0/system/src/Grav/Common/Flex/Types/Users/UserObject.php). - [
tests/unit/Grav/Common/Security/UserOverwriteSecurityTest.php](https://github.com/getgrav/grav/blob/2.0/tests/unit/Grav/Common/Security/UserOverwriteSecurityTest.php) — 3 tests pinning the PoC, the @@-prefix edge case, and pass-through for free usernames.
