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Improper AuthenticationWeakness · CWE-287

CVE-2025-64513

CRITICAL · 9.3 CVSS v4.0 Published 2025-11-10
Patch available
A vendor patch is available. No clean upgrade release — apply the published patch.
See remediation →
100/100
Remediation priority · Urgent
Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click Patch available

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 · unedited
Milvus is an open-source vector database built for generative AI applications. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit a vulnerability in versions prior to 2.4.24, 2.5.21, and 2.6.5 to bypass all authentication mechanisms in the Milvus Proxy component, gaining full administrative access to the Milvus cluster. This grants the attacker the ability to read, modify, or delete data, and to perform privileged administrative operations such as database or collection management. This issue has been fixed in Milvus 2.4.24, 2.5.21, and 2.6.5. If immediate upgrade is not possible, a temporary mitigation can be applied by removing the sourceID header from all incoming requests at the gateway, API gateway, or load balancer level before they reach the Milvus Proxy. This prevents attackers from exploiting the authentication bypass behavior.

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 analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-287

The 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 →

CVSS 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
Authentication
X
User interaction
None
Scope
X

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

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 · scoped
Patch available Apply the vendor patch
Vendor patch github.com →
Recommended fix High confidence

2.4.24, 2.5.21, or 2.6.5 (select based on your current version branch)

  1. 1. Identify your current Milvus version by checking the Milvus deployment or running 'milvus --version'
  2. 2. Determine which upgrade path is appropriate: if on 2.4.x branch, upgrade to 2.4.24; if on 2.5.x branch, upgrade to 2.5.21; if on 2.6.x branch, upgrade to 2.6.5
  3. 3. Backup your Milvus metadata and data stores according to standard backup procedures
  4. 4. Stop the Milvus cluster services in the correct order (stop Proxy first, then DataNodes, QueryNodes, and other components)
  5. 5. Upgrade the Milvus components to the chosen fixed version (2.4.24, 2.5.21, or 2.6.5) using your deployment method (Helm, Docker, or standalone binary)
  6. 6. Verify the upgrade by checking that all pods/services are running and the Milvus version is correct
  7. 7. Test basic operations (create collection, insert data, search) to confirm functionality
  8. 8. As an alternative temporary mitigation before upgrading, configure your API gateway, load balancer, or reverse proxy to strip the 'sourceID' header from all incoming requests before forwarding to Milvus Proxy
Caveat Review release notes for your target version to check for any breaking changes or migration requirements; minor version upgrades within the same branch typically have minimal breaking changes

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2025-64513 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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