Vulnerabilities / CVE-2017-12635

critical

CVE-2017-12635

Due to differences in the Erlang-based JSON parser and JavaScript-base ...

Published Modified CWE 269
In the Trivy database since at least 24 Oct 2026, 07:11 UTCWhen it arrived before that build is not recorded.

Severity by source

NVD9.8CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Trivy's own label is CRITICAL. Rated critical by NVD.

Description

Due to differences in the Erlang-based JSON parser and JavaScript-based JSON parser, it is possible in Apache CouchDB before 1.7.0 and 2.x before 2.1.1 to submit _users documents with duplicate keys for 'roles' used for access control within the database, including the special case '_admin' role, that denotes administrative users. In combination with CVE-2017-12636 (Remote Code Execution), this can be used to give non-admin users access to arbitrary shell commands on the server as the database system user. The JSON parser differences result in behaviour that if two 'roles' keys are available in the JSON, the second one will be used for authorising the document write, but the first 'roles' key is used for subsequent authorization for the newly created user. By design, users can not assign themselves roles. The vulnerability allows non-admin users to give themselves admin privileges.

Affected packages and fixed versions

SourcePackageFixed in
debian 7couchdb1.2.0-5+deb7u1

References

Vulnerability data compiled from the Trivy vulnerability database (trivy-db, Aqua Security, Apache License 2.0), which aggregates third-party advisories. CVE records are published by The MITRE Corporation under the CVE Terms of Use; CVE is a trademark of MITRE. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Severity, titles and advisory data from the GitHub Advisory Database (CC BY 4.0), Red Hat security data (CC BY 4.0) and the other sources linked on each entry. Entries may be summarised or re-formatted; the linked original is the authoritative record.