CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-31168 — Zulip is an open source team chat tool

High CVSS 8.8

Zulip is an open source team chat tool. Due to an incorrect authorization check in Zulip Server 5.4 and earlier, a member of an organization could craft an API call that grants organization administrator privileges to one of their bots. The vulnerability is fixed in Zulip Server 5.5. Members who don’t own any bots, and lack permission to create them, can’t exploit the vulnerability. As a workaround for the vulnerability, an organization administrator can restrict the `Who can create bots` permission to administrators only, and change the ownership of existing bots.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.8 (3.1)
Published
2022-07-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-285, CWE-863

Affected products

  • zulip / zulip

Matched remediation archetype

Authorization bypass, IDOR, and cross-tenant access

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map object and action authorization checks across API, UI, batch, import/export, and background-job paths.
  • Identify tenant, ownership, role, and policy boundaries for affected resources and administrative operations.
  • Use synthetic fixtures to compare intended access matrices without accessing another user's real data.

Remediate safely

  • Enforce server-side authorization at each resource access and state transition using the authenticated principal and trusted tenant context.
  • Scope data queries by tenant and ownership; treat client-supplied identifiers, roles, and policy claims as untrusted.
  • Add deny-by-default policy tests for horizontal and vertical access across every affected transport.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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