Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-41588 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-41588 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-41588?
- Critical severity, with a CVSS score of 9, published 8 May 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Inducer Relate <=2024.1.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-41588?
- A patch was published on 2026-04-17: Fixed in commit 2f68e16cd3b96d25c188c1aa3f7e13cdb15cdaeb Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-41588 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a web application.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-41588?
- Check whether you run Inducer Relate at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
Technical details
A timing attack vulnerability exists in RELATE's authentication mechanism within `course/auth.py` and `EmailedTokenBackend.authenticate()`. The root cause is the use of Python's standard `==` operator for comparing `sign_in_key` tokens, which performs non-constant-time string comparison. Because the comparison returns early upon finding a mismatched character, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can measure response time discrepancies to leak valid tokens byte-by-byte. This allows for full authentication bypass. The vulnerability has been remediated in commit 2f68e16 by implementing `hmac.compare_digest()` for constant-time comparison.
Affected products
- inducer RELATE <=2024.1
Timeline
- 2026-04-17: patched: Fixed in commit 2f68e16cd3b96d25c188c1aa3f7e13cdb15cdaeb
- 2026-05-08: disclosed
- 2026-05-08: advisory