CVE-2026-101041 Vulnerability-Lookup - Race Condition in Account Recovery Token Consumption Allows Password Takeover
An attacker with a valid recovery token can race to reset a user's password, potentially taking over the account.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-101041?
CVE-2026-101041 is a medium-severity vulnerability in vulnerability-lookup, published on 27 Sep 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
The account recovery (password reset) functionality in the vulnerability-lookup web application contains a time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition in the consumption of single-use recovery tokens. The original implementation verified the token nonce against the stored digest and then consumed (cleared) it in separate database operations. Two concurrent HTTP requests presenting the same valid recovery token could both pass the verification check before either transaction committed, allowing both to set their own password on the target account. The last transaction to commit overwrites the first, enabling an attacker who possesses a valid recovery token to replace the legitimate user's password with one of their choosing.
A secondary defect in the same endpoint (confirm_account) allowed a valid recovery link to be used to set an empty or trivially short password (e.g., three characters). The view handler performed only a manual equality comparison between the two password fields and never invoked the form's validation logic, bypassing the intended minimum-length and complexity constraints.
The affected component is the user account recovery endpoint (/user/confirm_account/<token>) and the associated token verification and consumption logic in the User model (website/models/user.py) and the view layer (website/web/views/user.py).
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-101041?
How do I fix CVE-2026-101041?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-101041 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2026-101041 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-101041 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-j3gx-2q66-wg27.