OpenSSL CVE-2026-33503

Description

The ListCourierMessages Admin API in Ory Kratos is vulnerable to SQL injection due to flaws in its pagination implementation.

Pagination tokens are encrypted using the secret configured in secrets.pagination. An attacker who knows this secret can craft their own tokens, including malicious tokens that lead to SQL injection. If this configuration value is not set, Kratos falls back to a default pagination encryption secret. Because this default value is publicly known, attackers can generate valid and malicious pagination tokens manually for installations where this secret is not set.

Preconditions

This issue can be exploited when the following conditions are met:

• ListCourierMessages API is directly or indirectly accessible to the attacker
• The attacker can pass a raw pagination token to the affected API
• The configuration value secrets.pagination is not set or known to the attacker

Impact

An attacker can execute arbitrary SQL queries through forged pagination tokens.

Mitigation

As a first line of defense, immediately configure a custom value for secrets.pagination by generating a cryptographically secure random secret, for example:

openssl rand -base64 32

Next, upgrade Kratos to a fixed version as soon as possible.