Description

HCL Hive is affected by a broken access control vulnerability which could allow an attacker or unauthorized user to introduce unverified, malicious, or broken code directly into production environments.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.2",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-24T13:17:32.477Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-24T13:17:32.477Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A broken access control vulnerability has been identified within HCL Hive, posing severe risk to enterprise production environments.\nThe vulnerability allows an attacker or unauthorized user to bypass intended authorization checks and directly introduce unverified, malicious, or broken code into production systems.\nThe flaw affects the HCL Hive product, specifically targeting authorization mechanisms governing code promotion or deployment workflows.\nSuccessful exploitation of this issue carries critical risk implications, including the complete compromise of production integrity, potential remote code execution, and unauthorized modifications to software artifacts.\nAttackers require unauthorized or low-privileged access depending on the misconfiguration of the access control boundary, enabling them to inject arbitrary payloads without adequate validation.\nNo specific authentication bypass primitives beyond the broken access control implementation are explicitly required, pointing to a failure in enforcing proper role-based or attribute-based access controls within the affected component.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability stems from improper authorization enforcement within HCL Hive's access control architecture.\nSpecifically, the application fails to adequately validate whether an interacting user or actor possesses the requisite privileges before permitting interactions with sensitive code integration or deployment pipelines.\nThis missing function-level or object-level access control permits unauthorized users to execute privileged operations reserved for authorized developers, release engineers, or automated CI/CD validation gates.\nThe affected component handles operational workflows that interface directly with production environments, making it a critical choke point for code integrity.\nDuring a typical attack flow, an adversary leverages the broken access control state by sending direct requests to restricted endpoints or interface functions associated with code deployment or repository updates.\nBecause the application omits proper backend verification of user permissions or session context against the requested action, the request is processed successfully.\nThe attacker is subsequently able to upload, push, or inject unverified, malicious, or structurally broken code directly into the production environment.\nThe payload behavior in such scenarios can range from the execution of arbitrary system commands and data exfiltration to widespread application defacement or denial of service resulting from broken code injection.\nPost-exploitation impact includes persistent compromise of the production infrastructure, unauthorized backdoor installation, and tampering with software supply chain integrity.\nNetwork exposure depends on the deployment architecture of HCL Hive, but typically involves network accessibility to web-based management interfaces or API gateways exposed by the platform."
}