CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-23208 — zot is a production-ready vendor-neutral OCI image registry

High CVSS 7.3

zot is a production-ready vendor-neutral OCI image registry. The group data stored for users in the boltdb database (meta.db) is an append-list so group revocations/removals are ignored in the API. SetUserGroups is alled on login, but instead of replacing the group memberships, they are appended. This may be due to some conflict with the group definitions in the config file, but that wasn't obvious to me if it were the case. Any Zot configuration that relies on group-based authorization will not respect group remove/revocation by an IdP. This issue has been addressed in version 2.1.2. All users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.3 (3.1)
Published
2025-01-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-269

Affected products

  • zotregistry / zot

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

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Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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