CVE-2026-25726: Cloudreve is vulnerable to Account Takeover via Weak Cryptographic Token Generation (Insecure PRNG Seeding)

This vulnerability affects Cloudreve instances that were first deployed/initialized with versions prior to V4.10.0.

The application uses the weak pseudo-random number generator math/rand seeded with time.Now().UnixNano() to generate critical security secrets, including the secret_key, and hash_id_salt. These secrets are generated upon first startup and persisted in the database.

An attacker can exploit this by obtaining the administrator’s account creation time (via public API endpoints) to narrow the search window for the PRNG seed, and use known hashid to validate the seed. By brute-forcing the seed (demonstrated to take <3 hours on general consumer PC), an attacker can predict the secret_key. This allows them to forge valid JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for any user, including administrators, leading to full account takeover and privilege escalation.

Note: Servers running V4.10.0+ are still vulnerable if they were originally installed using an older version, as the weak secrets persist in the configuration.