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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 6.5 CVE-2023-22497 EUVD-2023-26638

Netdata is vulnerable to improper authentication

Published Jan 14, 2023 · Updated Mar 10, 2025 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Netdata 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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
netdata netdata < 1.36.0-409, < 1.37 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 12 netdata 1.37.0-1 —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS netdata 1.33.1-1ubuntu1+esm1 USN-7250-1
Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS netdata 1.19.0-3ubuntu1+esm1 USN-7250-1
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS netdata 1.9.0+dfsg-1ubuntu0.1~esm1 USN-7250-1

Advisories 1

References