{"cve":"CVE-2026-78551","nvd":{"published":"2026-08-24T20:17:23.927","modified":"2026-10-12T21:10:00.227","status":"Deferred","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.\n\nFor 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nThe 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_v4":{"vector":"CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N","score":8.8},"cvss_v3":null,"cwes":["CWE-307","CWE-400"],"references":["https://github.com/RansomLook/RansomLook/commit/8602740347b0e928ad9fbaf5bc6ff242337dec6b"],"products":[],"source":"nvd","synced_at":"2026-10-19T22:50:17.453294893+00:00"},"epss":{"cve":"CVE-2026-78551","score":0.00649,"percentile":0.50806,"date":"2026-10-25"},"kev":null,"osv":[],"attribution":["This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.","EPSS scores: FIRST Exploit Prediction Scoring System, https://www.first.org/epss","Known exploited vulnerabilities: CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog","Package advisories: OSV (https://osv.dev), from the GitHub Advisory Database, PyPA, Go, RustSec and other ecosystem databases, under CC-BY 4.0 or CC0","CVE records: the CVE Program's CVE List (https://www.cve.org), under its terms of use (https://www.cve.org/Legal/TermsOfUse). CVE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation; this product is not affiliated with the CVE Program."]}