This CVE is a follow-up to CVE-2025-68613, meaning the initial fix was incomplete. That's a signal you need to weigh carefully: the advisory now tells you to restrict workflow creation permissions to fully trusted users. Read that as what it is — not a temporary measure, but the actual mitigation. The n8n team has concluded that expression evaluation cannot be secured for untrusted or semi-trusted users, and they've moved the security boundary upstream to the workflow creator. That's the fix. The code will keep getting patched; the permission guidance is what's staying.

The CVSS 9.9 with authentication required tells you something important about blast radius. This isn't a narrow admin-only path — it's accessible to any authenticated user who can create or edit workflows. In most n8n deployments, that group is intentionally broad because the platform's value proposition is enabling non-technical users to build automations. That same flexibility is now your attack surface. You cannot segment this blast radius without dismantling what n8n is designed to do.

Your immediate actions: audit who can create or edit workflows in your deployment. If that list includes anyone beyond a defined set of administrators, you're exposed. Check whether the expression evaluation feature is actually necessary for your workflows — disabling it reduces attack surface while you plan upgrades. The version fixes are 1.123.23 for the legacy branch and 2.10.2 or 2.9.4 for the 2.x series, but patching alone doesn't solve the underlying trust model. Even after upgrading, anyone who can author workflows still has a evaluation path into the system.

The deeper problem is operational, not technical: you likely have production workflows built over years by users who were explicitly trusted to create automations. Those workflows now operate in a security context the platform itself has walked back. Re-audit or re-architect automations built under assumptions that no longer hold. This isn't a patch-and-move-on vulnerability — it's a re-evaluation of who you trust with workflow creation, and that question doesn't have a software update answer.