Pterodactyl has a database resource limit bypass via race condition in Client API

Summary

The Pterodactyl Client API has a logic flaw that lets users bypass their assigned limits for database allocations. This happens because the database locking mechanism used in the controllers is totally broken and doesn't actually lock anything.

Details

Inside DatabaseController.php, the code tries to prevent multiple databases from being created at once by calling $server->databases()->lockForUpdate(). In Laravel, this just configures a query builder but never actually sends a command to the database because it’s missing a terminal method like count() or get(). It’s basically a no-op that does nothing.

Since there’s no real lock, multiple requests hitting the endpoint at the exact same time will all see that the database count is under the limit. They all move forward to the DeployServerDatabaseService and successfully create extra resources on the physical host.

Impact

Users are able to create more databases than they are supposed to, potentially also breaking the web interface.