Description

The Meari IoT Cloud Platform OpenAPI Service is vulnerable to an authorization flaw that allows authenticated users to manipulate the configurations of devices they do not own. This vulnerability enables attackers to perform unauthorized actions, such as altering device settings or triggering unintended behaviors, without verifying ownership or permissions.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.7",
  "pubDate": "2026-10-02T16:16:42.883Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-10-02T16:16:42.883Z",
  "executiveSummary": "The Meari IoT Cloud Platform OpenAPI Service suffers from a critical vulnerability involving an authorization bypass mechanism. This flaw allows any authenticated user of the platform to access and manipulate the configurations of arbitrary IoT devices deployed within the ecosystem, regardless of actual ownership or associated administrative permissions.\nThe vulnerability resides specifically within the OpenAPI service endpoints, which manage device settings and state changes. By failing to perform proper access control verification, the system permits unauthorized actors to alter operational parameters, disable functionalities, or trigger unintended behaviors on target devices. Because the exploitation requirements only involve having a standard authenticated account and knowledge of the target device identifier, the barrier to entry for potential attackers is exceptionally low. Consequently, this vulnerability presents significant risks to data privacy, system integrity, and physical security, depending on the nature of the deployed IoT hardware. Organizations utilizing the Meari IoT Cloud Platform OpenAPI Service must immediately address this access control gap to prevent unauthorized manipulation of their device networks.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability in the Meari IoT Cloud Platform OpenAPI Service is categorized as Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA), historically referred to as Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR). This vulnerability occurs because the platform's API gateway and backend application servers fail to implement a stateful mapping validation between the authenticated session token and the target resource identifier (the device ID) during API request processing.\nIn a secure architecture, when an API client attempts to perform a state-changing operation on a resource, the server must execute two distinct validation phases: authentication and authorization. The authentication phase verifies the identity of the caller (e.g., validating a JSON Web Token or an API key). The authorization phase must then query the database or an access control list to verify that the identified user has the explicit right to modify the specific object requested. In the vulnerable Meari OpenAPI implementation, the authorization phase is omitted or insufficient. The server validates that the incoming request contains a valid authentication token, but it relies implicitly on the client-supplied parameters to identify the target device. Because there is no validation step to correlate the authenticated user's account ID with the target device's registered owner ID, the server executes the requested configuration changes globally.\nAn attacker can exploit this flaw through the following sequence: First, the attacker authenticates to the Meari OpenAPI service using standard, low-privileged user credentials to obtain a valid session token. Second, the attacker intercepts or generates an HTTP request directed at an endpoint responsible for device configuration (e.g., updating firmware settings, network parameters, or operational modes). Third, the attacker modifies the target parameter containing the unique device identifier (such as a serial number, MAC address, or UUID) to match a target device owned by a different user. Fourth, the attacker transmits the request to the OpenAPI server. Fifth, the server successfully validates the attacker's active session token and directly applies the configuration payload to the database record of the specified target device without checking ownership.\nThe impact of this flaw is substantial, allowing unauthorized actors to alter device states, disable security controls, redirect telemetry data, or cause localized denial of service on targeted physical IoT hardware."
}