Executive brief
career-ops is an open-source AI-assisted job search tool with a local web dashboard for managing applications. Prior to version 0.8.0, the dashboard exposed API endpoints that could execute arbitrary commands and read/write user files without any authentication. An attacker could exploit this via cross-site requests from malicious web pages in another browser tab, or by accessing the dashboard from another computer on the local network, gaining the ability to execute code with the dashboard user's privileges.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a cross-origin request forgery (CSRF) combined with missing host validation in the career-ops local web dashboard. Prior to 0.8.0, the /api routes that spawn child processes and perform file I/O operations did not validate the request origin (Origin/Referer headers) or restrict listening to loopback addresses only. This allowed unauthenticated attackers to trigger command execution in two scenarios: (1) a malicious webpage in another browser tab could silently send cross-origin requests to http://localhost:3000/api/..., or (2) if the dashboard was bound to a non-loopback interface, any host on the local network could make direct requests. The fix in 0.8.0 implements origin checking via Sec-Fetch-Site headers and restricts the dashboard to loopback addresses (localhost, 127.0.0.0/8, ::1) by default, with explicit opt-in via CAREER_OPS_WEB_ALLOWED_HOSTS for other hosts.
Affected products
- career-ops career-ops before 0.8.0
Timeline
- 2026-09-10: disclosed: CVE published
- 2026-08-25: patched: Fix released in version 0.8.0