Pterodactyl Wings CVE-2026-52855

Impact

Type: Exposure of sensitive information / insufficiently protected credentials leading to privilege escalation and full node compromise.

Wings exposes its entire daemon configuration to the egg configuration-file templating engine. When Wings renders a server's configuration files, any {{config.<path>}} placeholder in a replacement value is resolved against the full marshalled daemon configuration, with no restriction on which paths may be read.

Because the Panel substitutes user-controlled egg variable values into these replacements before sending them to Wings, a low-privileged user can smuggle a {{config.*}} placeholder through a variable value. The placeholder is then resolved by Wings and written into a file inside the user's own server, where it can be read via the file manager or SFTP.

This allows reading, among other values:

• {{config.token}} - the node's daemon token, which is both the API bearer for

the Panel⇆Wings channel and the HMAC signing key for every JWT the node issues;

• {{config.token_id}};
• {{config.docker.registries}} - configured container-registry credentials.

Who is impacted: Any deployment where a user who is not fully trusted can set an egg variable value (e.g. a server owner or a subuser with the startup.update permission) and the server's egg renders a user-editable variable into a configuration file via {{server.build.env.*}}. This pattern is common across stock and community eggs, so most multi-tenant / shared-hosting deployments are affected.

Resulting impact: Disclosure of the node daemon token lets the attacker forge authentication tokens and act against every server on that node, a full-node compromise reachable from a low-privileged account.

Patches

Yes. Fixed in Wings v1.12.3 (Panel is unaffected; the fix is Wings-only).

Wings no longer exposes its full configuration to the templating engine only an explicit, non-secret subset (the Docker network interface) can be resolved by {{config.*}} placeholders.

Users should upgrade Wings to v1.12.3 or later.

After upgrading, rotate the affected nodes' daemon tokens, since a previously exfiltrated token remains valid until rotated (Admin → Nodes → Configuration → reset the token, then re-deploy config.yml to the node).

Workarounds

For operators who cannot upgrade immediately:

• Audit your eggs and ensure no user-editable variable is rendered into a

configuration file, or mark such variables non-editable.

These reduce exposure but are not a complete fix; upgrading Wings is the recommended action.