Developers of ThingsBoard, an open-source platform for managing IoT devices that’s used in various industry sectors, have fixed a vulnerability that could allow attackers to escalate their privileges on a server and send requests with administrative privileges. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-26462, was discovered and privately reported by researchers from IBM Security X-Force. It stems from the platform using a static key to sign JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) issued to clients. With knowledge of that key, which can be easily obtained, attackers could forge valid requests that would allow them to identify to the system as higher privileged users.
“Because ThingsBoard allowed the default key to be used without requiring administrators to change it, and because that default key was also exposed publicly in the configuration files, the door was opened for attackers to gain unauthorized access in excess of what is intended,” the X-Force researchers said in their report.