Auth bypass in Outline

CVE-2026-54573

Outline is a service that allows for collaborative documentation. Prior to 1.8.0, the AuthenticationHelper.canAccess function uses ctx.originalUrl to verify if an API key or OAuth token has the required scopes for a request. It extracts the resource by splitting the URL by / and taking the last segment. However, it fails to strip the URL fragment (#). Because Koa's router uses ctx.path (which strips the fragment) for routing, an attacker can append a fragment containing a permitted path (e.g., #foo/api/documents.info) to a restricted endpoint (e.g., /api/documents.create). The router will route the request to the restricted endpoint, but canAccess will evaluate the permitted path in the fragment, bypassing the API key scope restrictions and allowing privilege escalation. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.8.0.

Vulnerability class: Broken Access Control

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (40.3th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 40th percentile — 40.3% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-54573: held from 0.005 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.005 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References