CVE-2023-36462
MediumCVSS 5.4Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk40th percentile - higher than 40% of all known CVEs
Summary
Mastodon, a social network server based on ActivityPub, has a vulnerability that allows an attacker to craft a verified profile link that misleads users about the actual URL. Versions from 2.6.0 to prior to 3.5.9, 4.0.5, and 4.1.3 are affected.
Risk Assessment
An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to conduct phishing attacks, posing a risk to users and the organization's reputation.
Recommendation
It is recommended to upgrade to versions 3.5.9, 4.0.5, or 4.1.3, which contain a patch for this vulnerability.
Other vulnerabilities in Mastodon
See all- CVE-2026-22245High
Mastodon, a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub, has a vulnerability in its protection mechanism that blocks requests to local IP addresses. Some IP address ranges are missing, allowing an attacker to make Mastodon perform HTTP requests against loopback or local network hosts, potentially accessing private resources and services. This is fixed in Mastodon v4.5.4, v4.4.11, v4.3.17 and v4.2.29.
- CVE-2023-36460Critical
Mastodon, an ActivityPub-based social network server, has a vulnerability that allows attackers to create and overwrite arbitrary files in the system through carefully crafted media files. This affects versions from 3.5.0 to 3.5.8 and 4.0.0 to 4.1.2.
- CVE-2023-36459Critical
Mastodon, an ActivityPub-based social network server, has a vulnerability that allows attackers to bypass HTML sanitization using crafted oEmbed data. This enables the injection of arbitrary HTML into oEmbed preview cards, creating a vector for XSS attacks.
- CVE-2026-59825High
Vulnerability in Mastodon prior to versions 4.4.19 and 4.5.12. The ldap_authenticable.rb file mutates global OpenSSL parameters when LDAP uses LDAP_TLS_NO_VERIFY=true, disabling SSL/TLS certificate verification for puma web processes.
- CVE-2026-72916Medium
In Mastodon before versions 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1, PrivateAddressCheck.private_address? does not recognize IPv4-compatible IPv6 addresses, allowing an attacker to bypass ALLOWED_PRIVATE_ADDRESSES protection and send HTTP requests to loopback interfaces, potentially accessing private resources. Exploitation requires a system supporting the obsolete IPv4-compatible IPv6 mechanism.
- CVE-2026-72915High
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. From 4.6.0-beta.1 until 4.6.4 and 4.7.0-beta.1, any logged-in local user could use the show action in app/controllers/admin/collections_controller.rb to access personally identifying information about another local user in a collection because the controller used the general collection policy instead of the admin collection policy namespace. The exposed data included the other user's current email address and last-used IP address. This issue is fixed in versions 4.6.4 and 4.7.0-beta.1.
- CVE-2026-72914High
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. Prior to 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1, the administrative statistics endpoints handled by Api::V1::Admin::MeasuresController and Api::V1::Admin::RetentionController checked authorization only after beginning expensive calculations. Anonymous callers could submit keys, start_at, and end_at parameters that caused long-running SQL queries in Admin::Metrics::Measure, Admin::Metrics::Retention, and Admin::Metrics::Dimension::BaseDimension, allowing repeated requests to exhaust server resources. This issue is fixed in versions 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1.
- CVE-2026-50129High
Mastodon prior to versions 4.5.11, 4.4.18, and 4.3.24 contains a DoS vulnerability due to missing exception handling in the math sanitizer. Malformed <math> nodes can lead to a DoS of the entire server or targeted user services, depending on the actions involving those nodes.
- CVE-2026-50128Medium
Mastodon, a social network server based on ActivityPub, has a vulnerability in versions from 4.3.0 to 4.5.11 and 4.4.18 that allows modification of the attributionDomains value in signed activities. An error in the definition of this term makes Linked Data signatures ineffective.
- CVE-2026-48028Medium
Prior to versions 4.5.10, 4.4.17, and 4.3.23, Mastodon's normalization of incoming activities signed with Linked-Data Signatures did not adequately protect against a certain class of spoofing, allowing threat actors to remove JSON entries from valid signed activities from third-party actors.
Original NVD description (English source)
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. Starting in version 2.6.0 and prior to versions 3.5.9, 4.0.5, and 4.1.3, an attacker can craft a verified profile link using specific formatting to conceal arbitrary parts of the link, enabling it to appear to link to a different URL altogether. The link is visually misleading, but clicking on it will reveal the actual link. This can still be used for phishing, though, similar to IDN homograph attacks. Versions 3.5.9, 4.0.5, and 4.1.3 contain a patch for this issue.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

