Cross-community post featuring via missing ownership check
Published Aug 19, 2026 · Updated Aug 20, 2026
Incorrect authorization in federated Featured handling in LemmyNet Lemmy before 0.19.19 and 1.0.0-alpha.20 allows remote authenticated users to alter post featuring across communities. In crates/apub/activities/src/community/collection_add.rs and collection_remove.rs, the receive handlers dereference self.object as an ApubPost and update featured_community after verify_mod_action without checking that post.community_id matches community.id. Reachability requires moderator rights in any community and federation to a peer instance; the result is unauthorized pinning or unpinning of unrelated posts in featured feeds and listings.
Summary
What happened
Incorrect authorization in federated Featured handling in LemmyNet Lemmy before 0.19.19 and 1.0.0-alpha.20 allows remote authenticated users to alter post featuring across communities. In crates/apub/activities/src/community/collection_add.rs and collection_remove.rs, the receive handlers dereference self.object as an ApubPost and update featured_community after verify_mod_action without checking that post.community_id matches community.id. Reachability requires moderator rights in any community and federation to a peer instance; the result is unauthorized pinning or unpinning of unrelated posts in featured feeds and listings.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-54742
- Published
- Aug 19, 2026
- Updated
- Aug 20, 2026
- Vendor
- LemmyNet
- Product
- Lemmy
- Classifications
- CWE-863
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- authenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Aug 19, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Aug 20, 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?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=< 0.19.19
- Affected versionversion=>= 1.0.0-alpha.0, < 1.0.0-alpha.20
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
CVSS describes severity. EPSS estimates exploitation probability.
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
- GHSA PoC for cross-community feature misuseproof of concept · demonstrated
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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