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CVE-2026-44166 Moderate

PocketBase: Account pre-hijacking via OAuth2 autolinking upgrade in github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

PocketBase: Account pre-hijacking via OAuth2 autolinking upgrade in github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

Exploit probability 0.2%
Published July 24, 2026
Required by Not available
Last source change July 24, 2026

02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE

Affected packages

Unknown Unknown

167 explicit affected versions

Go github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase
Go github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

03 / CONNECTIONS

Connected vulnerabilities

04 / EVIDENCE

Source records

Open Source Vulnerabilities GHSA-pq7p-mc74-g65w

A pre-hijacking issue was discovered with the OAuth2 autolinking by [Alardiians](https://github.com/Alardiians). In some situations, if an attacker knows the email address of the victim they can create and link an **unverified** PocketBase user in advance by authenticating with one of the OAuth2 app providers, e.g. "A". When the victim gets invited or decides to sign up to your app on their own with provider "B" _(PocketBase OAuth2 auth requires to be with a different provider because we don't allow multiple OAuth2 accounts from the same provider to be associated to a single PocketBase user)_, the user created previously by the attacker will be autolinked, upgraded to **"verified"** and its old password reset. The upgrade flow operates within the expectations but the problem is that I forgot to clear the previous OAuth2 link(s) leaving the attacker to still have access to the initially created user. Or in other words, the vulnerability is similar to the [mixed password + OAuth2 auth pre-hijacking issue](https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/security/advisories/GHSA-m93w-4fxv-r35v) that we had in the past but with a slightly different angle. So with that in mind, and to avoid introducing breaking changes to the auth flows, a new fix was applied that automatically deletes all such pre-existing OAuth2 links on "unverified" to "verified" upgrades. **While the vulnerability requires some prerequisites, it is considered severe and it is strongly recommended to upgrade to v0.37.4 _(or to v0.22.42 if you are using an older <v0.23.0 release)_.**

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Open Source Vulnerabilities CVE-2026-44166

Pocketbase is an open source web backend written in go. Prior to 0.22.42 and 0.37.4, in some situations, if an attacker knows the email address of the victim they can create and link an unverified PocketBase user in advance by authenticating with one of the OAuth2 app providers, e.g. "A". When the victim gets invited or decides to sign up to your app on their own with provider "B" (PocketBase OAuth2 auth requires to be with a different provider because we don't allow multiple OAuth2 accounts from the same provider to be associated to a single PocketBase user), the user created previously by the attacker will be autolinked, upgraded to "verified" and its old password reset. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.22.42 and 0.37.4.

View original source
Open Source Vulnerabilities GO-2026-5548

PocketBase: Account pre-hijacking via OAuth2 autolinking upgrade in github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

View original source

05 / REFERENCES

Further evidence