A critical Broken Access Control vulnerability was identified in the ActionsController of the Avo framework (v3.x). Due to insecure action lookup logic, an authenticated user can execute any Action class (descendants of Avo::BaseAction) on any resource, even if the action is not registered for that specific resource. This leads to Privilege Escalation and unauthorized data manipulation across the entire application.
The vulnerability exists in the action_class method within app/controllers/avo/actions_controller.rb.
def action_class
# It searches through ALL descendants of BaseAction without resource validation
Avo::BaseAction.descendants.find do |action|
action.to_s == params[:action_id]
end
end
The controller identifies the action class to execute solely based on the params[:action_id] by searching through all BaseAction descendants. It fails to verify whether the requested action is actually permitted or registered for the resource context specified in the request URL (e.g., /admin/resources/posts/actions).
Consequently, an attacker can invoke sensitive actions (e.g., Avo::Actions::ToggleAdmin) through an unrelated resource endpoint (e.g., Post), bypassing the intended resource-action mapping.
This flaw results in significant security risks:
Steps to Reproduce:
Avo::Actions::ToggleAdmin).POST /admin/resources/posts/actionsaction_id=Avo::Actions::ToggleAdmin&fields[avo_resource_ids]=1ToggleAdmin logic on User 1, even though the request was made through the posts resource context.PoC Script Snippet:
# Simulating the unauthorized action execution
data = {
'action_id': 'Avo::Actions::ToggleAdmin',
'fields[avo_resource_ids]': '1', # Target Record ID
'authenticity_token': csrf_token
}
response = session.post(f"{BASE_URL}/admin/resources/posts/actions", data=data)
Restrict the action lookup to only those actions explicitly registered for the current resource context:
def action_class
# Validate that the action is registered for the current resource
@resource.get_actions.find do |action|
action.to_s == params[:action_id]
end
end
Illunight
{
"github_reviewed": true,
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-284",
"CWE-639"
],
"severity": "HIGH",
"github_reviewed_at": "2026-04-24T16:11:28Z",
"nvd_published_at": null
}