CVE-2023-22497
Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.
NVD · uneditedNetdata is an open source option for real-time infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. Each Netdata Agent has an automatically generated MACHINE GUID. It is generated when the agent first starts and it is saved to disk, so that it will persist across restarts and reboots. Anyone who has access to a Netdata Agent has access to its MACHINE_GUID. Streaming is a feature that allows a Netdata Agent to act as parent for other Netdata Agents (children), offloading children from various functions (increased data retention, ML, health monitoring, etc) that can now be handled by the parent Agent. Configuration is done via `stream.conf`. On the parent side, users configure in `stream.conf` an API key (any random UUID can do) to provide common configuration for all children using this API key and per MACHINE GUID configuration to customize the configuration for each child. The way this was implemented, allowed an attacker to use a valid MACHINE_GUID as an API key. This affects all users who expose their Netdata Agents (children) to non-trusted users and they also expose to the same users Netdata Agent parents that aggregate data from all these children. The problem has been fixed in: Netdata agent v1.37 (stable) and Netdata agent v1.36.0-409 (nightly). As a workaround, do not enable streaming by default. If you have previously enabled this, it can be disabled. Limiting access to the port on the recipient Agent to trusted child connections may mitigate the impact of this vulnerability.
Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.
dbcve analysisThe mechanism that verifies who a user is can be side-stepped or fooled, letting an attacker act as someone they're not. Everything built on top of that identity then becomes untrustworthy. Fixing it means hardening the full authentication flow, including edge cases, tokens, and secondary paths.
General guidance for the improper authentication class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →
Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.
NVD · CPE data< 1.37.0CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.
From the vector- Attack vector
- Network
- Complexity
- Low
- Privileges
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- High
- Integrity
- High
- Availability
- None
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.
dbcve · scoped1.37.0
Netdata agent v1.37 (stable) or v1.36.0-409 (nightly)
- Upgrade Netdata Agent to version 1.37.0 (stable) or higher
- If using nightly builds, upgrade to version 1.36.0-409 or higher
- Verify the streaming functionality works correctly after upgrade
- As an alternative mitigation if upgrade is not immediately possible: disable streaming by removing or commenting out configuration in stream.conf
- Alternatively: restrict access to the streaming port (typically 19999) on the parent/recipient Agent to only trusted child IP addresses
Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.
Scan for this in your stack
Free · runs locallyCheck whether your project pulls in CVE-2023-22497 — or any other known-vulnerable package — straight from your lock files. Free and open source; it runs locally and uploads nothing.
References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.
Primary sourcesPractitioner notes
ContributedPeer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2023-22497 in production — separate from our analysis above.
The advisory tells you what broke. It rarely tells you what actually worked. If you’ve dealt with this one, that detail is what the next engineer is searching for.
- The version that genuinely resolved it — not the one the vendor claimed
- A config change or rule that shut the vector down
- A gotcha in the upgrade path that cost you an afternoon
No notes yet
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- Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
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