Service degradation via unbounded passkey challenge storage
Published Jun 9, 2026 · Updated Jun 9, 2026
Resource exhaustion in Hermes WebUI before 0.51.270 allows remote attackers to degrade login availability via unauthenticated passkey requests. The public POST /api/auth/passkey/options handler mints a challenge for every request, and _store_challenge() appends it to .passkey_challenges.json before rewriting the whole uncapped file. Auth and passkeys must be enabled with a credential registered; repeated requests without completed assertions drive file growth and excessive CPU and disk I/O.
Summary
What happened
Resource exhaustion in Hermes WebUI before 0.51.270 allows remote attackers to degrade login availability via unauthenticated passkey requests. The public POST /api/auth/passkey/options handler mints a challenge for every request, and _store_challenge() appends it to .passkey_challenges.json before rewriting the whole uncapped file. Auth and passkeys must be enabled with a credential registered; repeated requests without completed assertions drive file growth and excessive CPU and disk I/O.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-49955
- Published
- Jun 9, 2026
- Updated
- Jun 9, 2026
- Vendor
- Nathan Esquenazi
- Product
- Hermes WebUI
- Classifications
- CWE-770, T1499.003
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jun 9, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jun 9, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
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- Affected versionversion=0 <0.51.270
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
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Technologies
Your stack
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