Kestra: Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution via Authentication Bypass in `AuthenticationFilter`
At a glance
Severity
CRITICAL 10.0
Exploitation
Known exploited (CISA KEV) · added 2026-09-02 Exploited per ENISA since 2026-09-02
EPSS
EPSS 2.10 % · percentile 82 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
GitHub_M
NVD status
Analyzed
Description
Kestra is an open-source, event-driven orchestration platform. Prior to 1.0.45 and 1.3.21, AuthenticationFilter in Kestra OSS uses request.getPath().endsWith("/configs") to whitelist the public configuration endpoint from Basic Auth. Because the check is a suffix match rather than an exact path match, any API path whose last segment is configs bypasses authentication entirely. An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this to create and execute arbitrary workflows without credentials. Because Kestra ships with script execution plugins (plugin-script-shell, plugin-script-python, etc.) enabled by default, this directly results in unauthenticated Remote Code Execution as root inside the Kestra worker container. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.0.45 and 1.3.21.
