Description

A party with write access to stored session data may affect JFrog Artifactory under specific conditions.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "6.6",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-12T15:18:22.360Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-12T15:18:22.360Z",
  "executiveSummary": "An improper access control and data handling vulnerability affects JFrog Artifactory under specific operational conditions. The security flaw stems from the handling of stored session data, allowing a threat actor who possesses write access to this data storage tier to compromise the integrity and security of active user sessions. The primary impact of this vulnerability involves potential session hijacking, unauthorized privilege escalation, or unauthorized access to sensitive repository resources managed by the application. The affected product is JFrog Artifactory, specifically in environments where session storage mechanisms lack adequate cryptographic integrity checks or strict access boundary enforcement. The risk implications are severe, as an authenticated or otherwise privileged entity with unauthorized or excessive write permissions to the underlying session storage can manipulate session states to impersonate other users, including administrators. Attacker capabilities are contingent upon achieving write access to the stored session data repository, which may occur via compromised backend storage credentials, misconfigured distributed caching systems, or lateral movement within a multi-tenant or compromised infrastructure. Exploitation requirements mandate that the attacker must first bypass perimeter defenses to attain write capabilities over the specific session data structures utilized by the application instance, after which crafted session payloads can be injected to achieve the desired malicious objective.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability resides within the session management architecture of JFrog Artifactory, specifically concerning how session data is serialized, stored, and deserialized or parsed when retrieved from persistence layers or distributed data grids. The root cause is rooted in the lack of cryptographic signing, encryption, or strict access validation applied to stored session records. In deployments where session data is externalized to shared storage solutions—such as clustered databases, distributed key-value stores, or network-attached file systems—insufficient isolation allows principals with write access to modify session attributes directly.\nThe attack flow begins when an attacker gains unauthorized or excessive write access to the designated storage location where JFrog Artifactory persists active user session data. Leveraging this access, the attacker crafts a malicious session payload or modifies existing active session tokens and attributes, such as user identifiers, role assignments, and security context flags. When a targeted user or an administrator attempts to interact with the application, JFrog Artifactory retrieves the manipulated session record from the storage layer. Due to the absence of robust integrity verification mechanisms, the application trusts the retrieved session state, deserializing or processing the forged attributes without validation.\nConsequently, the attacker's supplied context is accepted by the authentication and authorization subsystems, effectively elevating the attacker's privileges or binding the session to a victimized account context. The vulnerable component is the session persistence and validation subsystem within JFrog Artifactory. Authentication requirements for the exploitation vector depend on the security posture of the session storage tier itself, rather than the application's standard authentication interface, because the manipulation occurs outside the normal request-response cycle at the data persistence layer. Network exposure is typically internal or restricted to the infrastructure network hosting the session storage backend. The post-exploitation impact includes complete session takeover, unauthorized administrative access, exposure of proprietary build artifacts, and potential execution of administrative API actions within the Artifactory environment."
}