🔴 CVE-2026-42016

Summary

CVE-2026-42016 is a critical privilege escalation vulnerability affecting self-hosted versions of JFrog Artifactory prior to 7.133.11. The flaw exists because the application performs validation checks on a token’s signature and issuer but fails to adequately validate the token's associated scope, allowing an attacker to manipulate access permissions. This vulnerability is significant because it grants unauthorized actors the ability to escalate privileges within the platform, potentially leading to full administrative control over sensitive software supply chain infrastructure.

Exploitation

• Active Exploitation: The vulnerability is actively exploited in the wild, with reports confirming it is being used in attacks to gain administrative access ^[1][3].
• Threat Actors: Attackers have been observed chaining this vulnerability with others (such as CVE-2026-42018 and CVE-2026-82329) to bypass authentication mechanisms and compromise systems ^[1].
• Tooling: While specific public exploit scripts may be circulating due to active exploitation, the primary concern is the documented technique of bypassing token scope validation to achieve unauthorized privilege escalation.
• Prerequisites: The attack is network-based and targets internet-facing deployments; successful exploitation generally requires the ability to interact with the Artifactory token-based authorization mechanism, though specific authentication requirements may be bypassed via the exploit chain.

Affected Products & Patches

• Affected Versions: JFrog Artifactory (Self Hosted) versions prior to 7.133.11.
• Patch/Hotfix: Users should upgrade to Artifactory version 7.133.11 or later to remediate the vulnerability.
• Mitigations/Workarounds: In the interim, organizations are advised to restrict or whitelist token scopes within the authentication configuration and consider disabling the vulnerable token-based authorization mechanism until patches are applied ^[2].

Impact

• Access & Capability: Successful exploitation allows an attacker to escalate their privileges, bypass intended security controls, and gain administrative control over the Artifactory instance.
• Business Risk: For internet-facing deployments, this risk is severe as it potentially exposes the entire software supply chain managed by Artifactory. Compromise can lead to unauthorized code execution, theft of intellectual property, injection of malicious artifacts into production pipelines, and loss of integrity for the entire CI/CD ecosystem.