Impact

Remote code execution on the host machine by any authenticated user.

Proof Of Concept

Launching mongo-express on a Mac, pasting the following into the "create index" field will pop open the Mac calculator:

javascript this.constructor.constructor("return process")().mainModule.require('childprocess').execSync('/Applications/Calculator.app/Contents/MacOS/Calculator')

Patches Users should upgrade to version 0.54.0

Workarounds Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?

For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory: Open an issue in example link to repo Email us at example email address

Thanks

@JLLeitschuh for finding and reporting this vulnerability

This vulnerability has been exploited in the wild.

Under certain configurations of --tlsCAFile and tls.CAFile, MongoDB Server may skip peer certificate validation which may result in untrusted connections to succeed. This may effectively reduce the security guarantees provided by TLS and open connections that should have been closed due to failing certificate validation. This issue affects MongoDB Server v7.0 versions prior to and including 7.0.5, MongoDB Server v6.0 versions prior to and including 6.0.13, MongoDB Server v5.0 versions prior to and including 5.0.24 and MongoDB Server v4.4 versions prior to and including 4.4.28.

Required Configuration : A server process will allow incoming connections to skip peer certificate validation if the server process was started with TLS enabled (net.tls.mode set to allowTLS, preferTLS, or requireTLS) and without a net.tls.CAFile configured.

MongoDB Compass may be susceptible to code injection due to insufficient sandbox protection settings with the usage of ejson shell parser in Compass' connection handling. This issue affects MongoDB Compass versions prior to version 1.42.2

MongoDB Server may access non-initialized region of memory leading to unexpected behaviour when zero arguments are called in internal aggregation stage. This issue affected MongoDB Server v6.0 version 6.0.3.

A MongoDB server under specific conditions running on Linux with TLS and CRL revocation status checking enabled, fails to check the revocation status of the intermediate certificates in the peer's certificate chain. In cases of MONGODB-X509, which is not enabled by default, this may lead to improper authentication. This issue may also affect intra-cluster authentication. This issue affects MongoDB Server v5.0 versions prior to 5.0.31, MongoDB Server v6.0 versions prior to 6.0.20, MongoDB Server v7.0 versions prior to 7.0.16 and MongoDB Server v8.0 versions prior to 8.0.4. Required Configuration : MongoDB Server must be running on Linux Operating Systems and CRL revocation status checking must be enabled

BSON::XS versions 0.8.4 and earlier for Perl includes a bundled libbson 1.1.7, which has several vulnerabilities.

Those include CVE-2017-14227, CVE-2018-16790, CVE-2023-0437, CVE-2024-6381, CVE-2024-6383, and CVE-2025-0755.

BSON-XS was the official Perl XS implementation of MongoDB's BSON serialization, but this distribution has reached its end of life as of August 13, 2020 and is no longer supported.

All versions of bson before 1.1.4 are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data. The package will ignore an unknown value for an object's bsontype, leading to cases where an object is serialized as a document rather than the intended BSON type.

The MongoDB BI Connector ODBC Driver may write outside the bounds of a fixed-size buffer when an application supplies an unusually long catalog, schema, or object name to a metadata retrieval function. This may result in memory corruption within the calling application's process, leading to abnormal termination and, under certain conditions, the potential for arbitrary code execution.

An administrative user with access to configure webhooks can execute arbitrary commands by configuring and then triggering webhooks containing specific FreeMarker template syntax.

This issue affects all MongoDB Ops Manager 7.0 versions and MongoDB Ops Manager versions 8.0.22 and prior.

When compute mode is enabled on a standalone mongod instance, insufficient validation of externally sourced BSON data during aggregation pipeline processing can result in memory corruption, potentially leading to process termination or other unintended behavior. This configuration is non-default and requires explicit enablement at startup.

MongoDB 3.4.x before 3.4.10, and 3.5.x-development, has a disabled-by-default configuration setting, networkMessageCompressors (aka wire protocol compression), which exposes a vulnerability when enabled that could be exploited by a malicious attacker to deny service or modify memory.

An issue in MongoDB Server's intra-cluster connection setup could allow a party with suitable network access to influence which authentication mechanism is used when one replica set member connects to another. Under certain conditions, this could cause the cluster's shared internal credential to be transmitted in a less-protected form, potentially allowing that credential to be recovered. If recovered, the credential could be used to authenticate as the internal superuser to nodes in the deployment.

The MongoDB Shell may be susceptible to control character injection where an attacker with control of the user’s clipboard could manipulate them to paste text into mongosh that evaluates arbitrary code. Control characters in the pasted text can be used to obfuscate malicious code. This issue affects mongosh versions prior to 2.3.9

An authenticated user may trigger a use after free that may result in MongoDB Server crash and other unexpected behavior, even if the user does not have authorization to shut down a server. The crash is triggered on affected versions by issuing an aggregation framework operation using a specific combination of rarely-used aggregation pipeline expressions. This issue affects MongoDB Server v6.0 version prior to 6.0.21, MongoDB Server v7.0 version prior to 7.0.17 and MongoDB Server v8.0 version prior to 8.0.4 when the SBE engine is enabled.

MongoDB Connector for BI installation via MSI on Windows leaves ACLs unset on custom install directories allows Privilege Escalation.This issue affects MongoDB Connector for BI: from 2.0.0 through 2.14.24.

Incorrect Default Permissions vulnerability in MongoDB Atlas SQL ODBC driver on Windows allows Privilege Escalation.This issue affects MongoDB Atlas SQL ODBC driver: from 1.0.0 through 2.0.0.

Incorrect Default Permissions vulnerability in MongoDB BI Connector ODBC driver allows Privilege Escalation.This issue affects BI Connector ODBC driver: from 1.0.0 through 1.4.6.

A use-after-free vulnerability can be triggered in sharded clusters by an authenticated user with the read role who issues a specially crafted $lookup or $graphLookup aggregation pipeline.

An application using the MongoDB BI Connector ODBC Driver may experience a memory-safety issue when processing output parameters from a stored procedure. Triggering this issue requires connecting to an untrusted or impersonated database server that returns crafted metadata. This may result in process termination, disclosure of process memory, or, under certain conditions, arbitrary code execution.

Mismatched length fields in Zlib compressed protocol headers may allow a read of uninitialized heap memory by an unauthenticated client. This issue affects all MongoDB Server v7.0 prior to 7.0.28 versions, MongoDB Server v8.0 versions prior to 8.0.17, MongoDB Server v8.2 versions prior to 8.2.3, MongoDB Server v6.0 versions prior to 6.0.27, MongoDB Server v5.0 versions prior to 5.0.32, MongoDB Server v4.4 versions prior to 4.4.30, MongoDB Server v4.2 versions greater than or equal to 4.2.0, MongoDB Server v4.0 versions greater than or equal to 4.0.0, and MongoDB Server v3.6 versions greater than or equal to 3.6.0.

A series of specifically crafted, unauthenticated messages can exhaust available memory and crash a MongoDB server.

An issue in MongoDB Server's time-series collection implementation allows an authenticated user with database write privileges to trigger an out-of-bounds memory write in the mongod process. The issue results from an inconsistency in the internal field-name-to-index mapping within the time-series bucket catalog. Under certain conditions this can result in arbitrary code execution.

This issue impacts MongoDB Server v5.0 versions prior to 5.0.33, v6.0 versions prior to 6.0.28, v7.0 versions prior to 7.0.34, v8.0 versions prior to 8.0.23, v8.2 versions prior to 8.2.9 and v8.3 versions prior to 8.3.2.

A vulnerability in MongoDB Server's BSON validation logic allows an unauthenticated user to crash the mongod process by sending a specially crafted message. The BSON validator's handling of certain nested binary data structures permits uncontrolled mutual recursion between validation functions, where each re-entry resets internal depth tracking.

A use-after-free vulnerability exists in MongoDB Server's server-side JavaScript engine when converting BSON documents to JavaScript arrays. An authenticated user with read privileges who is able to run server-side JavaScript (for example, via $where or $function) can cause the server to access memory that has already been freed. This may result in disclosure of information from the mongod process memory or a denial of service through a server crash.

An issue in MongoDB Server's aggregation framework could allow an unauthenticated party to cause a mongos (router) process to terminate unexpectedly by submitting a specially formed aggregation command. This could result in a denial of service, disrupting client connections routed through the affected mongos instance.

A network-reachable client that has not yet authenticated can hold a MongoDB Connector for BI authentication session open indefinitely by beginning a SASL-based login exchange and then declining to complete it. Because the negotiation loop had no overall time bound and the read from the client had no deadline, each such session retains a worker, a client connection slot, and its associated backend database connections until the process is restarted. Repeated use of this behavior can consume the configured connection capacity and prevent legitimate users from establishing new sessions.

An unauthenticated party able to reach the port of a MongoDB Connector for BI (mongosqld) instance may generate enough routine connection log activity to exhaust the storage backing the configured log path. When a log write or log rotation operation subsequently fails, the resulting error is not handled and the shared mongosqld process ends, ending service for all connected SQL clients. The process continues to end on startup until an operator restores available storage, and the diagnostic message explaining the condition is not recorded.

A user able to submit SQL through an application using the MongoDB Connector for BI ODBC driver can supply a positioned-cursor statement whose cursor name exceeds the size of an internal fixed-length buffer. Because the name length is not bounded before the driver builds its diagnostic message, memory adjacent to that buffer is overwritten with user-supplied content. This can terminate the hosting application process and may allow unintended code to run within it.

When mongosqld is configured with a client certificate authority file, the listener requests a client certificate during the TLS handshake but does not require one, so a client that presents no certificate is still accepted. In deployments that rely on client certificates as the sole means of identifying users, a remote party with network access to the listener can therefore establish a session and read the MongoDB data exposed through the connector.

The MongoDB C Driver's Cyrus SASL integration performs unsafe string copying during username canonicalization, enabling a heap buffer overflow before any authentication or network traffic. This may be triggered by passing untrusted input in the username of a MongoDB URI with authMechanism=GSSAPI.