Executive brief
SurrealDB, a multi-model cloud database, is affected by a vulnerability that allows certain users to view data they are not authorized to see. Users who have permission to update records can bypass security restrictions that were intended to hide specific data fields by intentionally triggering database errors. These error messages inadvertently reveal the hidden information, potentially leading to the exposure of sensitive customer or internal data.
Technical details
An information disclosure vulnerability exists in SurrealDB's error handling logic (CWE-209). Authenticated users with UPDATE privileges can bypass field-level SELECT permissions by executing incompatible arithmetic or 'extend' operations on restricted fields. Because UPDATE permission checks evaluate against the unreduced document and the database engine embedded raw operand values in error responses (e.g., "Tried to compute 'sensitive_value' + 1"), an attacker can systematically leak hidden field values. The issue is resolved in version 3.1.0 by replacing raw operand values in error messages with their respective type names.
Affected products
- SurrealDB SurrealDB < 3.1.0
Timeline
- 2026-05-27: advisory: GitHub Security Advisory GHSA-6g9v-7gq3-p2c6 published
- 2026-07-20: disclosed: CVE-2026-63748 published to NVD