Executive brief
PraisonAI is a multi-agent team system platform with API endpoints protected by JWT authentication. When the JWT secret is not explicitly configured and the environment is not explicitly set to production, the platform falls back to a publicly known default secret key, allowing unauthenticated attackers to forge valid authentication tokens and gain unauthorized access to protected API endpoints.
Technical details
The vulnerability is an authentication bypass in praisonai_platform/services/auth_service.py stemming from unsafe JWT secret defaults. When the PLATFORM_JWT_SECRET environment variable is unset, the service assigns the hardcoded, publicly known value "dev-secret-change-me" as the JWT signing key. Additionally, the PLATFORM_ENV environment variable defaults to "dev" when unset, preventing the production guard that would reject insecure configurations from executing. A remote unauthenticated attacker can mint HS256 JWT tokens with arbitrary claims (sub, email) and authenticate to protected API routes without legitimate credentials. The AuthService._verify_token() and get_current_user() functions accept these forged tokens. This vulnerability is fixed in version 0.1.6 by no longer defaulting PLATFORM_ENV to dev and auto-generating an ephemeral random secret with a warning when PLATFORM_JWT_SECRET is absent in non-dev environments.
Affected products
- MervinPraison PraisonAI before 0.1.6
Timeline
- 2026-09-15: disclosed
- 2026-06-03: patched: Fixed in commit e0fb8e7 and released in version 0.1.6