Summary
An Insecure Direct Object Reference has been found to exist in createHeaderBasedEmailResolver() function within the Cloudflare Agents SDK. The issue occurs because the Message-ID and References headers are parsed to derive the target agentName and agentId without proper validation or origin checks, allowing an external attacker with control of these headers to route inbound mail to arbitrary Durable Object instances and namespaces .
Root cause
The createHeaderBasedEmailResolver() function lacks cryptographic verification or origin validation for the headers used in the routing logic, effectively allowing external input to dictate internal object routing.
Impact
Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) in email routing lets an attacker steer inbound mail to arbitrary Agent instances via spoofed Message-ID.
Mitigation:
- PR: https://github.com/cloudflare/agents/blob/main/docs/email.md ] provides the necessary architectural context for coding agents to mitigate the issue by refactoring the resolver to enforce strict identity boundaries.
- Agents-sdk users should upgrade to agents@0.3.7
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.