Description

Determined fails to authorize requests on the generic task kill, pause, and unpause endpoints in the API handlers. Authenticated attackers can disrupt other users' workloads by terminating, pausing, or unpausing tasks they do not own.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "7.1",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-17T21:16:49.897Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-17T21:16:49.897Z",
  "executiveSummary": "Determined contains an authorization bypass vulnerability affecting the generic task kill, pause, and unpause endpoints within its API handlers.\nThe vulnerability allows authenticated attackers to disrupt workloads belonging to other users by maliciously terminating, pausing, or unpausing unauthorized tasks.\nThe impact includes severe denial of service, data loss resulting from abrupt workload termination, and operational disruption within the affected Determined platform.\nThe risk implications are high for multi-tenant environments where unauthorized users can interfere with critical machine learning experiments and compute tasks.\nAttacker capabilities are limited to authenticated users who possess the ability to interact with the API handlers, but they do not require ownership of the target tasks.\nExploitation requirements include valid authentication credentials to access the Determined API and knowledge of target task identifiers to issue unauthorized control commands.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability stems from a failure in the API handlers to properly enforce access control checks and validate user ownership prior to executing state-transition requests on tasks.\nThe vulnerable components are the generic task management endpoints responsible for handling kill, pause, and unpause operations.\nAuthentication requirements dictate that the attacker must be authenticated to the platform, but privilege requirements are insufficient as standard users can manipulate tasks owned by other principals.\nNetwork exposure is defined by the accessibility of the Determined API handlers over the network.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: First, an authenticated attacker identifies or enumerates target task identifiers running on the Determined platform. Second, the attacker constructs HTTP requests targeting the generic task kill, pause, or unpause API endpoints. Third, lacking proper authorization enforcement, the API handlers process the request without validating whether the authenticated session owns or has administrative permissions over the specified tasks. Finally, the platform executes the requested state change, resulting in unauthorized termination, pausing, or unpausing of the victim's workload.\nPost-exploitation impact includes persistent workload disruption, denial of service for machine learning pipelines, and resource manipulation across the affected Determined deployment."
}