CISA issues alert on Kotaemon improper authorization checks
2 companies named across 2 categories, one of 77 articles referencing GitHub. Previous coverage: CISA Issues Update on Dokploy OS Command Injection (Sep 2026).
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Cinnamon’s Kotaemon, all versions up to v0.12.0, contains an authorization-check flaw in its multi-user chat interface. The vulnerability allows an authenticated user to access or modify conversation data that is owned by another user, resulting in confidentiality, integrity, and availability violations.
The issue affects four handlers: select_conv, delete_conv, rename_conv, and persist_chat_suggestions. The handlers query conversations using select(Conversation).where(Conversation.id == conversation_id) without adding a predicate to ensure Conversation.user == user_id. As a result, any authenticated user can operate on conversations they do not own. The related issue is tracked as CVE-2026-86867.
select_conv can return full chat transcripts, RAG retrieval history including verbatim excerpts from uploaded private documents, plot history, and suggestion data belonging to another user. delete_conv permanently deletes a conversation, rename_conv renames a conversation, and persist_chat_suggestions overwrites a chat suggestion list. The system trusts user-controlled identifiers for authorization, and attackers require only an authenticated account and a victim conversation UUID.
No official patch is available at this time because the vendor could not be reached to coordinate the vulnerability. Guidance is to monitor the vendor’s web site and the GitHub repository for future updates. References provided include https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon and https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/.
In multi-user mode, each conversation row includes a user field that identifies its owner, but the authorization check is not applied consistently across the conversation data returned by select_conv. Although select_conv includes an ownership check for the selected (file-picker) field, all sensitive payloads (chat history, retrieval history, plot history) are returned unconditionally when a conversation is loaded by conversation_id.
Blog post, originally published by Bob Kemerer at kb.cert.org.