Ente provides end-to-end encrypted cloud services and security tools. Prior to server image 2026.07.09, the POST /emergency-contacts/approve-recovery endpoint authorized approval using a client-supplied userID and updated an emergency recovery session using only its client-supplied recovery-session UUID. An accepted emergency contact could submit the contacts own identifier, transition the victims session from WAITING to READY, clear wait_till, retrieve recovery information, and continue account recovery before the owner-configured notice period expired. Exploitation of the approval bypass required the victim to have previously added and accepted the attacker as an emergency contact, and it did not create recovery rights for an arbitrary account. Separately, the same insufficiently scoped update pattern affected the reject and stop recovery transitions, allowing a user who knew another recovery-session UUID to potentially cancel a session to which the user was not a party. This issue is fixed in server image 2026.07.09.
Weakness
The system’s authorization functionality does not prevent one user from gaining access to another user’s data or record by modifying the key value identifying the data.
Extended Description
Retrieval of a user record occurs in the system based on some key value that is under user control. The key would typically identify a user-related record stored in the system and would be used to lookup that record for presentation to the user. It is likely that an attacker would have to be an authenticated user in the system. However, the authorization process would not properly check the data access operation to ensure that the authenticated user performing the operation has sufficient entitlements to perform the requested data access, hence bypassing any other authorization checks present in the system. For example, attackers can look at places where user specific data is retrieved (e.g. search screens) and determine whether the key for the item being looked up is controllable externally. The key may be a hidden field in the HTML form field, might be passed as a URL parameter or as an unencrypted cookie variable, then in each of these cases it will be possible to tamper with the key value. One manifestation of this weakness is when a system uses sequential or otherwise easily-guessable session IDs that would allow one user to easily switch to another user’s session and read/modify their data.