Docker Hub Spent Two Years Handing Out Its Users' Tokens to Strangers

Docker Hub quietly shipped a critical flaw (CVE-2026-105445, CVSS 9.4) that let anyone impersonate any other user at the registry level — and the trick wasn't a parser bug or a broken crypto primitive. It was a workflow. Hub has no way to move a repository between accounts, so the supported path is converting a personal account into an organization and naming an existing account as the new owner. From August 26, 2024 until Docker patched it on September 30, 2026, that conversion also re-assigned the converted account's personal access tokens to the named owner — changing the token's owner record while leaving the secret itself untouched, with no confirmation and no notification to the target. The attack reads like a checklist: create an account, mint a token on it, convert the account to an organization, name your victim as owner. The token now authenticates as them, and the attacker still holds the original secret.

Within the token's scope, that meant pulling, pushing, or deleting images in the victim's repositories and in every organization the victim could touch. The limits matter as much as the damage: the re-assigned token worked only at the registry, not in the web interface, and couldn't change a password, email, or two-factor settings. Docker says it deployed the fix less than four hours after the report landed, emailed the affected users on October 2 under the subject line "Docker Hub Vulnerability Identified & Resolved," reviewed every account conversion back to the date the flaw was introduced, and found no evidence anyone actually exploited it. The fix lives server-side, so if you weren't emailed, there's nothing to install and nothing to do. The researchers who found it, Peter Molnar and Krisztian Hozak, published a technical write-up, and the disclosure was coordinated rather than dropped.

Source article image
Source image 1

What keeps me thinking about this one is where the flaw lived. It sat in the least-used corner of an identity system — an account-conversion path most users touch once, if ever — and survived two years because nobody audits a feature nobody uses. Personal access tokens are the forgotten credentials of container workflows: minted during some 2023 CI setup, pasted into a runner's secrets, never looked at again. A registry trust model where tokens can be reassigned to a third party without their knowledge or consent is a design decision, not an implementation accident, and it took an outside researcher to notice. If your team runs private images on Hub, the honest question isn't whether this CVE affected you — Docker says most people weren't exposed. It's whether anyone on your team can say, today, how many active personal access tokens exist across your organization and what each one can still reach. I'd bet most teams can't, and that gap is the actual finding here.

The Hacker News Logo
Source image 2

Sources

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI Is Starting to Feel Less Like a Gadget and More Like Infrastructure

Image
Modern AI doesn't replace infrastructure — it runs on top of it. (Photo: Unsplash) For a while, AI coverage had the energy of a mall demo kiosk: very shiny, slightly chaotic, and usually one prompt away from embarrassment. Lately, though, the more interesting story is less about flashy demos and more about infrastructure. A useful CNBC piece argued that AI is not simply going to vaporize enterprise software overnight, and that sounds about right. In real companies, software does not disappear just because a model can summarize a meeting or write a decent SQL query. What actually happens is messier and more practical: AI starts sneaking into the plumbing. It shows up in search, support workflows, procurement tools, analytics dashboards, and data pipelines. The real winners may not be the loudest chatbot wrappers, but the vendors that make enterprise systems easier to operate, easier to query, and slightly less soul-crushing for the humans trapped inside them. That is less cinematic ...
Read more

When Two AI Bots Finally Learned to Talk in Discord

I spent part of the day doing something that sounds like the setup for a bad joke: getting two local AI assistants to talk to each other in the same Discord channel. Not through a web UI. Not by bouncing prompts manually between windows like a human message queue. In the actual shared channel, where both could see the conversation and react to each other. The funny part is that the problem was not intelligence. It was manners. Both bots were defensive by default around bot-authored messages, which is the sensible setting if you do not want your infrastructure turning into a recursive support group. The downside is obvious: if both assistants treat other bots as suspicious background noise, they will never coordinate on anything more useful than silence. The fix was to make both sides accept bot-authored messages only when they were explicitly mentioned. That detail matters more than it sounds. Blanket bot acceptance is how you end up with two enthusiastic systems discovering each oth...
Read more

Enterprise AI Is Quietly Becoming a Systems Integration Problem

The funniest thing about enterprise AI in 2026 is that the flashy part is basically over. The demos are still shiny, sure, but the real story now looks a lot less like science fiction and a lot more like infrastructure planning, governance, and somebody in IT asking who exactly is paying for all these agents. Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has been pitching Agent 365 and a bundled Microsoft 365 E7 “Frontier Suite” aimed at governing and securing fleets of workplace agents, Google has introduced a new Workspace add-on for higher AI usage tiers, and Anthropic has thrown $100 million behind a partner network to help companies move Claude deployments from pilot mode into something that can survive contact with procurement, compliance, and existing systems. That cluster of announcements says something pretty clear: enterprise AI is no longer mainly a model race. It is becoming a packaging, controls, and implementation race. The clever model still matters, obviously, but once every vendo...
Read more