CVE-2026-48978

oras-go: Malicious registry can hijack Bearer token realm to exfiltrate credentials and refresh tokens

Summary

oras-go's auth.Client follows the realm URL from a registry's WWW-Authenticate: Bearer challenge without validating its scheme or host. The realm field is server-controlled by design in the OCI/distribution spec — registries legitimately point token requests at a separate auth endpoint (e.g. Docker Hub's registry-1.docker.io -> auth.docker.io), so cross-host realms on public DNS names are not in themselves a vulnerability. Two specific patterns, however, are never legitimate under any registry trust model and can be abused by a malicious or compromised registry (or a man-in-the-middle on a plaintext connection):

• SSRF to internal networks. A realm of http://169.254.169.254/... (AWS/Azure IMDS), http://10.0.0.x/... (RFC 1918), or http://127.0.0.1/... causes oras-go running on a cloud VM or corporate workstation to issue outbound HTTP requests from inside the user's trust boundary to an endpoint the user did not choose. The user's stored credentials are attached to those requests, but the principal harm is the network primitive — probing internal endpoints from the client. On IMDSv1 the response body is recoverable from log channels; on IMDSv2 the probe itself can still be used for service discovery.
• TLS downgrade. A registry contacted over https:// can return a realm with an http:// scheme, causing oras-go to send the user's credentials over plaintext to the token endpoint. This defeats the transport security the user chose when typing https://.

What is NOT claimed

This advisory does not claim that credential forwarding to an arbitrary public attacker host through a server-controlled realm is, on its own, a vulnerability. The distribution spec defines realm as a server-controlled field; a strict same-host or same-eTLD+1 enforcement would deviate from the spec and break legitimate split-host deployments. Operators who want defense-in-depth against cross-host realm forwarding can use the opt-in Client.TrustedRealmHosts allowlist (added separately).

Affected versions

oras.land/oras-go/v2 <= v2.6.0

Severity

Medium. Network attack vector, low complexity, no privileges required, user interaction required (victim runs an oras command against the malicious or MITM'd registry), unchanged scope. Confidentiality impact is limited — IMDS probe responses can disclose information, and TLS downgrade exposes the realm request to passive observers — but the attacker does not obtain credentials beyond what the malicious endpoint already controls.

Affected code

• registry/remote/auth/client.go — Client.Do() (bearer challenge handling)
• registry/remote/auth/client.go — Client.fetchBearerToken() / fetchDistributionToken / fetchOAuth2Token

The realm parameter from parseChallenge is threaded through to http.NewRequestWithContext without scheme or host validation.

CWE

• CWE-918: Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
• CWE-319: Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information

Patch

registry/remote/auth/client.go now rejects realm URLs that:

• use a scheme other than http or https
• use http when the registry was contacted over https (TLS downgrade)
• use an IP literal in a loopback, link-local, private, or unspecified range, unless the registry itself was reached at the same hostname (so loopback / in-cluster deployments are unaffected)

Cross-host realms on public DNS names continue to be accepted.

Credit

Reported by bugbunny.ai.