Description

HCL AION is affected by a vulnerability where user sessions did not expire after a sufficient period of inactivity. An unattended authenticated session could be used by another person with access to the same system to view information or perform actions on behalf of the user, potentially resulting in unintended behavior or security impact under certain conditions.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "3.3",
  "pubDate": "2026-11-06T16:18:58.050Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-11-06T16:18:58.050Z",
  "executiveSummary": "HCL AION suffers from an improper session management vulnerability characterized by a lack of mandatory session expiration following extended periods of user inactivity.\nThe vulnerability allows for the persistence of authenticated session tokens beyond a secure duration, effectively increasing the window of opportunity for unauthorized access.\nAn attacker with physical or logical access to an unattended workstation that remains logged into an active HCL AION session can hijack the user's security context.\nThis flaw facilitates unauthorized data exfiltration, unauthorized modification of records, and the execution of administrative or operational actions under the victim's identity.\nThe risk is categorized as significant in environments where workstations are shared or left unsupervised, as the application fails to enforce automated session invalidation policies.\nNo specific attacker expertise is required; the exploit relies primarily on the availability of an active, unattended session that has not reached an expiration threshold due to the lack of strict session timeouts.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability lies in the implementation of the session management lifecycle within HCL AION, which fails to enforce robust, server-side inactivity timeouts. In standard secure web application architectures, the server-side session store should track the 'last accessed' timestamp for each unique session identifier. When the delta between the current time and the last accessed time exceeds a defined policy threshold, the application is expected to invalidate the session token on the server, forcing a re-authentication attempt.\nIn the context of HCL AION, the session remains active indefinitely or for an excessively long period despite the user having ceased interaction with the interface. This behavior results in the session cookie or token remaining valid and authorized in the backend session state, even when the client-side environment is unattended.\nThe attack flow is straightforward but high-impact. First, an authenticated user accesses the HCL AION platform and performs legitimate tasks. Upon leaving the workstation unattended without explicitly logging out, the session remains in an active state. A secondary actor who gains physical or logical access to the workstation can interact with the browser session, which still holds a valid authentication context. Because the server has not invalidated the session, the attacker does not need to provide valid credentials or bypass authentication mechanisms; they operate directly within the authenticated scope of the original user.\nThe vulnerable component is the application's session management module. The lack of idle-timeout enforcement effectively negates the security controls provided by the initial authentication handshake. Exploitation requires neither network-level interception nor sophisticated payload injection; it is a logic-based vulnerability where the persistence of the session state is improperly managed. Post-exploitation impact includes unauthorized access to sensitive application data, the potential for unauthorized administrative configuration changes, and the ability to conduct transactions or state-changing operations within the application. This vulnerability is particularly critical in multi-user environments or shared-terminal workstations where the probability of leaving a session active is significantly higher. The absence of an inactivity timeout policy allows the session identifier to persist until the browser process is terminated or the server process is restarted, exposing the organization to persistent unauthorized access risks."
}