Description

HCL AION is affected by a vulnerability where the account lockout mechanism did not sufficiently restrict repeated failed login attempts, allowing an attacker to make a large number of password guesses against a user account. This may increase the risk of account compromise through brute-force attacks, potentially resulting in unintended behavior or security impact under certain conditions.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "5.3",
  "pubDate": "2026-11-06T16:18:58.193Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-11-06T16:18:58.193Z",
  "executiveSummary": "HCL AION is susceptible to a brute-force authentication vulnerability stemming from an ineffective account lockout mechanism. This security flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to conduct a high volume of consecutive password guessing attempts against specific user accounts without triggering account suspension or rate-limiting thresholds. The vulnerability facilitates unauthorized access by overcoming standard credential-based security barriers, posing a significant risk of account compromise. The impact includes potential unauthorized data access, privilege escalation, and lateral movement within the environment. Exploitation requires only the ability to reach the authentication interface over the network, making it a highly accessible vector for malicious actors seeking to harvest valid credentials through automated dictionary or brute-force attacks.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability in HCL AION is rooted in an insufficient implementation of the account lockout logic within the authentication module. While the system is designed to provide security via access control, the mechanism fails to enforce an effective policy to mitigate automated credential stuffing or brute-force attempts. Specifically, the backend authentication service does not track or validate failed login thresholds across repeated requests, effectively creating a stateless or loosely coupled verification flow that ignores recurring authentication failures for targeted accounts.\nDuring an attack, an adversary leverages automated tooling to initiate a series of HTTP POST requests against the HCL AION login endpoint. Because the application does not impose a mandatory back-off period, account lockout, or CAPTCHA challenge after a pre-defined number of failed attempts, the attacker is able to execute thousands of password permutations in a short temporal window. The lack of proactive monitoring or temporary account suspension allows the attacker to systematically iterate through wordlists until a successful authentication event occurs.\nThe technical failure persists because the validation logic fails to update the user object's failed-attempt counter in the underlying database or cache layer, or because the threshold configuration is set to an effectively infinite value. Consequently, the session management system treats each authentication request as an independent event, providing no mechanism for the system to distinguish between a legitimate user misremembering a password and a sophisticated automated attack. This lack of stateful monitoring bypasses standard defensive posture, allowing the attacker to maximize the probability of credential exposure.\nSuccessful exploitation results in the compromise of valid user credentials. Once authenticated, the attacker gains the permissions associated with the targeted account, which may range from standard user access to administrative privileges depending on the target. Post-exploitation impact typically involves unauthorized access to sensitive business data managed by HCL AION, modification of system configurations, or further exploitation of internal services accessed via the compromised session. The absence of network-based rate limiting or per-account lockout makes this vulnerability a persistent threat for environments that expose the AION authentication portal to the public internet."
}