Skip to content

Dpanel's hard-coded JWT secret leads to remote code execution

Critical
donknap published GHSA-j752-cjcj-w847 Apr 15, 2025

Package

gomod dpanel (Go)

Affected versions

<1.6.1

Patched versions

1.6.1

Description

Summary

The Dpanel service contains a hardcoded JWT secret in its default configuration, allowing attackers to generate valid JWT tokens and compromise the host machine.

Details

The Dpanel service, when initiated using its default configuration, includes a hardcoded JWT secret embedded directly within its source code. This security flaw allows attackers to analyze the source code, discover the embedded secret, and craft legitimate JWT tokens. By forging these tokens, an attacker can successfully bypass authentication mechanisms, impersonate privileged users, and gain unauthorized administrative access. Consequently, this enables full control over the host machine, potentially leading to severe consequences such as sensitive data exposure, unauthorized command execution, privilege escalation, or further lateral movement within the network environment. It is recommended to replace the hardcoded secret with a securely generated value and load it from secure configuration storage to mitigate this vulnerability.

PoC

The core code snippet is shown below:

import jwt

def generate_jwt(appname):

    payload = {
        "SECRET_KEY""SECRET_VALUE",
    }
    print("appname:", appname)
    print("payload:", str(payload))
    token = jwt.encode(payload, SECRET_KEY.format(APP_NAME=appname), algorithm="HS256")
    return token

appname = "SECRET_KEY"
token = generate_jwt(appname)
print("url token:", token)

Impact

Attackers who successfully exploit this vulnerability can write arbitrary files to the host machine's file system, and all users with Dpanel versions less than 1.6.1 are affected.

Severity

Critical

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2025-30206

Credits