Investigate in your agent.

Turn this advisory into a focused investigation. Ask your agent to check your project’s versions, explain the evidence, and suggest a compatible fix.

Your agent needs remote MCP support and access to https://cve.new/mcp.

Read the setup guide

Skip to content
cve.newCreate a CVE report
Check your stack
CVE-2026-71863

SecureDrop: Onion Service client auth credentials copied to Monitor Server

Products / packages freedomofpress securedrop

Published

Share

Severity and exploitation

Not in CISA KEV

KEV coverage does not rule out exploitation.

KEV checked 15/11/2026, 04:45:31 UTC
GitHub_M · CVSS:3.1 · 2.6
Assessment vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:N/A:N

Severity

low2.6

CVSS measures technical severity, not the likelihood of an attack.

Known exploitation

Not listed in the checked CISA KEV catalog

Absence from CISA KEV does not rule out attacks.

Public exploit

Not established by this record

Missing evidence does not mean no public exploit exists.

Remediation

Fix status not established

No structured fix or guidance is available here. Check the latest publisher advisory.

What this means

SecureDrop versions 2.13.0 to 2.16.1 have a vulnerability where Onion Service client auth credentials are copied to the Monitor Server if journalist alerts are disabled. An attacker must compromise the Monitor Server to obtain the credentials. The credentials are an additional protection layer, not sufficient for access by themselves.

Summarized by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast. Verify details against the original sources.

Attack conditions

An attacker must first compromise the privileged Monitor Server to obtain the credentials, and the credentials remain an additional protection layer rather than sufficient access by themselves because the Journalist Interface still requires a username, passphrase, and MFA, while SSH access still requires SSH keys.

Excerpt from the original source description below.

Review supporting sources →

Affected versions

Check the exact model, release, and any platform requirements against your installation.

freedomofpress · GitHub_M

securedrop

1 range
GitHub_M version evidence

Compare with this publisher’s ranges. This does not inspect your installation.

affected

>= 2.13.0, < 2.16.1

unaffected

unknown

Other versions: unknown

Automatic dependency matching is unavailable for this record. Use the product evidence and publisher’s instructions to check your installation.

What to do

Compare your installed product and version with the affected versions above. A matching product name alone does not confirm exposure.

No structured fix or remediation guidance is available here. Check the full source description and vendor’s latest advisory for a patch or workaround; do not assume another version is safe.

cve.new guidance unless attributed to a publisher. This page does not inspect your installation.

Public exploit evidence

No public exploit reference is identified in the imported evidence. This is not a claim that no exploit exists.

Original source description

Read the full publisher description

SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can use to securely accept documents from, and communicate with anonymous sources. From 2.13.0 until 2.16.1, running the securedrop-admin install Ansible playbook with journalist alerts disabled leaves the journalist alert key filename empty, causing the copy task to transfer every file in ~/.config/securedrop-admin/, including Onion Service client authentication credentials, to the Monitor Server. An attacker must first compromise the privileged Monitor Server to obtain the credentials, and the credentials remain an additional protection layer rather than sufficient access by themselves because the Journalist Interface still requires a username, passphrase, and MFA, while SSH access still requires SSH keys. This issue is fixed in version 2.16.1.

References

3 sources
freedomofpress/securedrop · security/advisories/GHSA-rqwh-4873-322p
Security advisoryGitHub_M
freedomofpress/securedrop · commit 8947b8a
PatchGitHub_M
freedomofpress/securedrop · releases/tag/2.16.1
Release notesGitHub_M

Inside the record

Evidence available

Package identity · not supplied
Version evidence
Remediation guidance · not supplied
Weakness classification
Additional publishers

Describes the evidence in this view, not whether the product is safe.

Original records

CVE-2026-71863

View the latest unmodified CVE JSON from the official source. It may be newer than this imported page.

cve.new JSON →

Underlying weaknesses

The source’s classification of what caused the vulnerability.

CWE-201 ↗

CWE-201: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data

GitHub_M

Related →
Contributing organizations · 2
GitHub_M

Assigning organization

2026-11-06
CISA-ADP

Additional data publisher

2026-11-10

Timeline

All times UTC

  1. Advisory published

    Publication date supplied by the source.

  2. Source updated

    Latest modification date supplied by the source.

  3. Last imported by cve.new

    Latest catalog import, not the date we first saw this advisory.

What changed

Follow changes
  1. CVE · CVE-2026-71863

    Observed 2026-11-10T20:24:20.806Z · upstream updated 2026-11-10T20:13:25.018Z

    Prioritization updated

    before

    []

    after

    [
  {
    "source": "CISA-ADP",
    "type": "SSVC",
    "role": "CISA Coordinator",
    "timestamp": "2026-11-10T20:13:14.995471Z",
    "decisions": [
      {
        "name": "Exploitation",
        "value": "none"
      },
      {
        "name": "Automatable",
        "value": "no"
      },
      {
        "name": "Technical Impact",
        "value": "partial"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Large field values are marked as truncated previews. Original source snapshots remain retained.

Showing up to 50 most recent observed changes.