cognee CVE-2026-105141

Exploitable only when the operator has NOT set the FASTAPI_USERS_JWT_SECRET environment variable (and, for related flows, FASTAPI_USERS_RESET_PASSWORD_TOKEN_SECRET / FASTAPI_USERS_VERIFICATION_TOKEN_SECRET), causing cognee <=1.5.4 to sign JWTs with the built-in literal "super_secret" in get_api_auth_backend.py. This is the shipped default behavior, so default/unconfigured installs are vulnerable; the attacker needs network reachability to the cognee API and knowledge of the public default secret, but no account. The primary limiting factor is configuration: any deployment that explicitly set a strong secret is unaffected, and v1.6.0 removes the fallback entirely by generating a per-process random secret.

This is a hard-coded credentials flaw (CWE-798): when FASTAPI_USERS_JWT_SECRET is left unset, cognee up to 1.5.4 falls back to the publicly known literal value "super_secret" to sign authentication JWTs, as confirmed by the GitHub source diff. Anyone who knows this default (now public in the repo and this advisory) can forge valid tokens - including admin tokens, which the removed cognee/get_token.py helper demonstrates directly - yielding a full authentication bypass against any deployment that relied on the default. The input CVSS 4.0 vector (PR:L, VC:L/VI:L/VA:L, score 5.3/MEDIUM) UNDERSTATES this: forging a token requires no prior privileges (should be PR:N, not PR:L) and grants administrative access, so impact is realistically High, not Low - verify with vendor/VulDB. No EPSS score was provided and the CVE is NOT in CISA KEV; no public exploit is catalogued, so there is no evidence of active exploitation. The decisive real-world limiter is configuration: deployments that already set a strong FASTAPI_USERS_JWT_SECRET are not affected, and in v1.6.0 the fallback was replaced with a per-process random secret. Net: the headline MEDIUM score masks a trivially exploitable critical-style auth bypass for default/unconfigured installs, but exposure is gated by deployment hygiene and the product's limited footprint rather than by attacker difficulty.

An attacker locates an internet-reachable cognee API deployed with FASTAPI_USERS_JWT_SECRET unset (the default). Because the signing key is the publicly known string "super_secret", the attacker crafts and signs a JWT asserting an admin user_id/roles (exactly as the shipped get_token.py helper does) and presents it to the API. The server validates the forged token and grants administrative access with no credentials; no formal public PoC is catalogued, but the removed get_token.py effectively serves as a working token-forging primitive.