SurrealDB before 2.5.0 and before 3.0.0-beta.3 contains a confused deputy privilege escalation vulnerability. Unprivileged users (e.g., those with the database editor role) can create or modify fields containing futures, functions, or closures. Because these are executed in the context of the invoking/querying user rather than their creator, an attacker can plant malicious logic that executes with a higher-privileged user's permissions when that user reads or writes the affected record. This can lead to full privilege escalation, including creation of a root owner and server takeover.
SurrealDB before v2.6.1 (and before v3.0.0-beta.3) contains a denial of service vulnerability in its embedded JavaScript scripting engine, which is enabled via the --allow-scripting capability (disabled by default). Any user able to execute arbitrary queries — including unauthenticated guests when --allow-guests is enabled — can use built-in string functions to construct a large string and pass it to the JavaScript runtime for compilation, triggering a null pointer dereference in the underlying QuickJS-NG engine. This causes the server process to terminate immediately without graceful shutdown, requiring a manual restart. The issue was fixed by updating the rquickjs dependency from v0.9.0 to v0.11.0.