CVE-2026-50221
MediumCVSS 5.4Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk10th percentile - higher than 10% of all known CVEs
Summary
In OpenStack Swift before version 2.37.2, the proxy-server does not strip internal update headers (X-Container-Host, X-Container-Device, X-Delete-At-Host, X-Delete-At-Device) from client requests before forwarding them to object-servers. An authenticated user with write access can inject these headers to redirect container update requests to an attacker-controlled server, enabling server-side request forgery (SSRF).
Risk Assessment
The SSRF attack exposes internal cluster metadata including storage policy indexes, partition mappings, device names, and when encryption at rest is enabled, ciphertext and initialization vectors for the container-level encryption key. The attacker can also cause 'ghost listings' in arbitrary containers via the shard-range redirect mechanism.
Recommendation
Immediately upgrade OpenStack Swift to version 2.37.2 or later, which strips internal update headers from client requests. As a temporary measure, configure firewall rules to block outbound requests to unknown servers.
Other vulnerabilities in OpenStack Swift
See all- CVE-2026-71192Medium
In OpenStack Swift through 2.38.0, the S3API middleware does not sanitize Swift-native control headers (X-Copy-From, X-Copy-From-Account) from S3 API requests when s3_acl=true. An attacker can inject these headers into a signed PUT request targeting their own bucket, causing Swift to perform a server-side copy from another tenant's private object. The source object authorization is bypassed because the S3API middleware has already authorized the request against the destination.
- CVE-2026-71191Medium
In OpenStack Swift through 2.38.0, the S3API middleware does not enforce that semantic x-amz-* headers are covered by the SigV4 signature on presigned URL requests. An attacker with a presigned PUT URL can inject an unsigned X-Amz-Copy-Source header, causing Swift to perform a server-side copy from an arbitrary source object using the signer's authorization context. This allows reading any object the signer has access to, provided the target project_id, container name, and object name are known.
- CVE-2026-71190High
In OpenStack Swift through 2.38.0, the proxy server Accept header parser contains a regular expression vulnerable to catastrophic backtracking (ReDoS). The "qdtext" pattern (?:[^"]|\\.)* allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to send a crafted Accept header that causes exponential CPU consumption in the proxy worker. A payload of 32 backslash-character pairs exceeds 30 seconds of CPU time. Repeated requests can exhaust all proxy worker threads, resulting in a complete denial of service.
- CVE-2026-49017High
In OpenStack Swift before 2.36.2 and 2.37.2, the s3api middleware enters an infinite loop when processing a truncated aws-chunked PUT request body. The StreamingInput class repeatedly appends an empty buffer and re-reads, causing the proxy-server worker to become permanently unresponsive with increasing CPU and memory consumption. An authenticated attacker can exhaust all proxy-server workers, resulting in denial of service. The defect was introduced in Swift 2.36.0.
Original NVD description (English source)
In OpenStack Swift before 2.37.2, proxy-server does not strip internal update headers (X-Container-Host, X-Container-Device, X-Delete-At-Host, X-Delete-At-Device) from client requests before forwarding them to object-servers. An authenticated user with write access can inject these headers to redirect container update requests to an attacker-controlled server, enabling server-side request forgery. The SSRF requests expose internal cluster metadata including storage policy indexes, partition mappings, device names, and when at rest encryption is enabled, cipher text and initialization vectors for the container-level encryption key. The attacker can also cause "ghost listings" in arbitrary containers via the shard-range redirect mechanism.