CVE-2026-48082 Denial of service in appointment-booking-software
An attacker can bypass rate limiting in OpenReception's booking flow due to weak proof-of-work difficulty, enabling automated abuse and potential service disruption.
- 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-2026-48082?
CVE-2026-48082 is a low-severity denial of service vulnerability in open-reception appointment-booking-software, published on 6 Aug 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
OpenReception's appointment booking software provides an end-to-end encrypted appointment booking platform. Prior to version 1.0.6, the bootstrap challenge endpoint at `/api/tenants/{id}/appointments/bootstrap-challenge` issues a SHA-256 proof-of-work with `difficulty=4` hex zeros, equivalent to 16 bits of work. Modern hardware solves this in under 200 milliseconds, providing essentially no friction against automated abuse of the patient booking flow. Proof-of-work is used in the booking flow as a rate-limiter for unauthenticated clients establishing tunnels and submitting appointments. At 16 bits of difficulty, the construct is decorative rather than effective. An attacker can solve PoW challenges as fast as the server can issue them, defeating the rate-limiting purpose. The handler also calls `challengeThrottleService.checkThrottle(binding, "passkey")`, but the binding includes attacker-controlled values (`tunnelId`, `clientPublicKey`, and optional `emailHash`). For each fresh attempt, the attacker can supply new values, producing a new throttle key and bypassing the per-binding accumulation. Practical abuse friction is therefore the PoW difficulty itself, not a stable per-IP or per-email server-side throttle. Version 1.0.6 fixes the issue.
Weakness: CWE-770
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-48082?
How do I fix CVE-2026-48082?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-48082 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2026-48082 being exploited?
It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-48082 exists.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-hm9g-mh7x-657g.