Summary
Wukong_HRM contains a missing authorization vulnerability in which callers are incorrectly treated as HR administrators and data-scope checks return records for all employees. Any authenticated low-privileged employee may therefore access sensitive personnel and payroll information or perform company-wide administrative actions.
Wukong_HRM contains a missing authorization vulnerability in which callers are incorrectly treated as HR administrators and data-scope checks return records for all employees. Any authenticated low-privileged employee may therefore access sensitive personnel and payroll information or perform company-wide administrative actions.
Affected context
The issue occurs in deployments where EmployeeAspect assigns administrative privileges broadly and EmployeeUtil does not restrict employee data by the requesting user's scope. It is especially risky when ordinary authenticated employees can reach endpoints for payslips, salary records, bank cards, employee records, departments, or contracts without resource-level authorization checks.
The issue occurs in deployments where EmployeeAspect assigns administrative privileges broadly and EmployeeUtil does not restrict employee data by the requesting user's scope. It is especially risky when ordinary authenticated employees can reach endpoints for payslips, salary records, bank cards, employee records, departments, or contracts without resource-level authorization checks.
Exploit preconditions
- Attack surface: Authenticated Wukong_HRM application endpoints - Required access: A valid account with otherwise low-privileged employee access - Trigger point: Requests to read sensitive records or modify and delete HR resources - Why exploitation is possible: Authorization logic grants administrator-level
treatment and data-scope checks expose records beyond the caller's permitted
organizational scope
- Attack surface: Authenticated Wukong_HRM application endpoints - Required access: A valid account with otherwise low-privileged employee access - Trigger point: Requests to read sensitive records or modify and delete HR resources - Why exploitation is possible: Authorization logic grants administrator-level
treatment and data-scope checks expose records beyond the caller's permitted
organizational scope
Why this happens
The underlying bug is an authorization enforcement failure. EmployeeAspect assigns every caller the HR administrator role, while EmployeeUtil data-scope checks effectively return all employees instead of restricting results to authorized subjects. This maps to CWE-862, Missing Authorization, because protected operations and objects are reachable without a sufficiently specific permission or ownership check.
The underlying bug is an authorization enforcement failure. EmployeeAspect assigns every caller the HR administrator role, while EmployeeUtil data-scope checks effectively return all employees instead of restricting results to authorized subjects. This maps to CWE-862, Missing Authorization, because protected operations and objects are reachable without a sufficiently specific permission or ownership check.
Potential impact
- An attacker may read payslips, salary records, bank-card details, and personal data.
- An attacker could edit bank-card information belonging to other employees.
- An attacker may delete employees, departments, or contracts across the company.
- The organization could face privacy breaches, payroll disruption, fraud, or data loss.
- An attacker may read payslips, salary records, bank-card details, and personal data.
- An attacker could edit bank-card information belonging to other employees.
- An attacker may delete employees, departments, or contracts across the company.
- The organization could face privacy breaches, payroll disruption, fraud, or data loss.
General mitigation guidance
Mitigation generally focuses on enforcing authorization at every sensitive operation and applying least privilege by default. Common defensive patterns include deriving roles from trusted identity and organizational attributes, requiring explicit permissions for administrative actions, enforcing resource-level and tenant or department-level data scopes, and denying access when scope resolution is absent or ambiguous. Sensitive records and destructive operations should use separate policies, with audit logging, approval controls, and constrained service-account privileges where appropriate. Authorization behavior should be covered by negative tests for cross-user and cross- department access.
Mitigation generally focuses on enforcing authorization at every sensitive operation and applying least privilege by default. Common defensive patterns include deriving roles from trusted identity and organizational attributes, requiring explicit permissions for administrative actions, enforcing resource-level and tenant or department-level data scopes, and denying access when scope resolution is absent or ambiguous. Sensitive records and destructive operations should use separate policies, with audit logging, approval controls, and constrained service-account privileges where appropriate. Authorization behavior should be covered by negative tests for cross-user and cross- department access.
How teams detect issues like this
Detection approaches include static analysis for authorization decisions that assign elevated roles unconditionally, data-scope methods that return unrestricted query predicates, and controller or service methods that lack permission checks. Code review should examine every read, update, and delete path for both action authorization and object-level scope enforcement. Dynamic testing can use low-privileged accounts to verify access to other employees' records and destructive endpoints. Policy enforcement may include authorization test suites, endpoint permission inventories, audit-log monitoring, and automated review tools that flag missing or overly broad access checks.
Detection approaches include static analysis for authorization decisions that assign elevated roles unconditionally, data-scope methods that return unrestricted query predicates, and controller or service methods that lack permission checks. Code review should examine every read, update, and delete path for both action authorization and object-level scope enforcement. Dynamic testing can use low-privileged accounts to verify access to other employees' records and destructive endpoints. Policy enforcement may include authorization test suites, endpoint permission inventories, audit-log monitoring, and automated review tools that flag missing or overly broad access checks.
