DevGuard has improper authorization on public assets

Impact

On a DevGuard API instance with one or more public assets, any authenticated user — including users from a different organization with no membership or role in the affected org/project — can create, update, reapply, and delete VEX rules on those public assets. The same flaw affects the other vulnerability-triage write endpoints exposed under a public asset, including:

• VEX rule create / update / reapply / delete
• Dependency-vuln event creation (accept / reject / mitigate decisions), batch event creation, vuln sync, and mitigation
• License risk creation
• External reference writes
• Artifact creation and license refresh

The attacker needs a valid account on the instance, but no membership in the victim organization, project, or asset is required.

Security impact is primarily to integrity of the vulnerability picture of public assets: an attacker can mark CVEs as false-positive, silence vulnerabilities, attach misleading justifications, or delete legitimate triage rules — undermining the trustworthiness of every consumer of the affected asset's VEX/SBOM output. Because public assets are by definition consumed by third parties (downstream users, supply-chain consumers, the published vex.json/sbom.json), the blast radius extends to anyone relying on that data.

Private assets are not affected by this advisory: the public-read exemption that enables the bypass does not apply to them, and access remains correctly gated by organization/project membership. The private setting is only relevant in DevGuard itself — there is no impact given when you have an open-source project on e.g. GitLab/GitHub and a private DevGuard asset connected.