CVE-2026-78551
RansomLook contains multiple weaknesses in its authentication endpoint that allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to enumerate valid usernames, perform unrestricted password-guessing attacks, and potentially exhaust application worker resources.
Does this matter?
High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.40%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.
Description
RansomLook contains multiple weaknesses in its authentication endpoint that allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to enumerate valid usernames, perform unrestricted password-guessing attacks, and potentially exhaust application worker resources. For local authentication, the login implementation previously checked whether a submitted username existed before invoking the password hash verification function. Requests containing a nonexistent username therefore returned significantly faster than requests for valid accounts, for which the computationally expensive password verification routine was executed. A remote attacker could measure these response-time differences to determine which usernames correspond to valid RansomLook accounts. In addition, the /login endpoint did not restrict the number or frequency of failed authentication attempts. An attacker could consequently perform password brute-force, dictionary, password-spraying, or credential-stuffing attacks against known accounts without server-side throttling. For valid usernames, each authentication attempt also invokes the password key-derivation function, which consumes a significant amount of CPU time. A sufficiently high rate of login attempts could therefore occupy the application's synchronous Gunicorn workers and cause a denial of service affecting the entire application. The issue has been addressed by always performing password verification using a randomly generated dummy password hash when the supplied username does not exist, eliminating the username-dependent timing discrepancy. Failed authentication attempts are additionally rate-limited per client IP address using Valkey/Redis, with five failed attempts within five minutes resulting in a one-hour block. The reverse-proxy configuration was also updated so that the application derives the client address from a trusted X-Forwarded-For value that cannot be overridden by a client-supplied header.
- CVSS 4.0
- 8.8 HIGHCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/M
- EPSS
- 0.40% probability · 34th percentile
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-307, CWE-400
- Source
- 5a6e4751-2f3f-4070-9419-94fb35b644e8
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.