Open WebUI: `WEB_FETCH_FILTER_LIST` host allow/block filter bypassable via URL path and non-label-boundary matching
🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)
📋 Description
Summary
The administrator-configured WEB_FETCH_FILTER_LIST (the allow/block list applied to server-side web fetches: RAG URL ingestion, URL-to-markdown, web-search content fetch) matches hostnames incorrectly, so the filter can be bypassed.
Details
is_string_allowed (backend/open_webui/utils/misc.py) matches with str.endswith(...), and the primary web-fetch call site (backend/open_webui/retrieval/web/utils.py) called it with the full URL string, not the hostname:
- Blocklist bypass via path. A blocklist entry
!internal.example.comonly matches a URL that ends with that string. Any URL with a path (https://internal.example.com/x) ends with/x, so the entry never matches and the fetch proceeds. The blocklist effectively only stopped path-less URLs. - Allowlist false-reject and bypass. An allowlist
company.comrejected the legitimatehttps://api.company.com/statusand admittedhttps://attacker.example/path/company.com. - Non-label-boundary matching at the hostname-shaped call site (
retrieval/web/main.py):endswith('corp.com')also matchedevilcorp.com, and10.0.0.1matched110.0.0.1.
Impact
An authenticated user able to trigger a server-side web fetch can reach hosts the administrator intended to block with WEB_FETCH_FILTER_LIST.
Open WebUI's primary SSRF protection is a separate, always-on guard that rejects any URL resolving to a non-global IP (validate_url and the connection-layer _ssrf_safe_new_conn, active whenever ENABLE_RAG_LOCAL_WEB_FETCH is off, the default). That guard is unaffected by this issue and continues to block loopback, RFC1918 and link-local addresses, including the 169.254.169.254 cloud-metadata endpoint. This bypass therefore does not grant access to those internal targets. What it defeats is the administrator's ability to block specific publicly-resolvable hosts (internal services reachable from the server over a public IP, e.g. split-horizon DNS or internal PaaS endpoints) and to enforce an allowlist. Fetched content is returned to the requester, so for hosts reachable from the server's network position this is a read/content-disclosure SSRF against the admin-blocked host.
Patch
Matching is now performed on the parsed hostname using DNS label boundaries. A dedicated is_host_allowed(host, ...) matches an entry only when host and entry are equal or the entry is a parent domain (host == entry or host.endswith('.' + entry)), so corp.com matches api.corp.com but not evilcorp.com, and IP entries match only the identical address. Both web-fetch call sites pass the parsed hostname rather than the full URL. The generic is_string_allowed is retained unchanged for unrelated non-host filters.
Credit
Reported by @addcontent.
🎯 Affected products1
- pip/open-webui:< 0.10.0
🔗 References (6)
- https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/security/advisories/GHSA-qg3f-8x3j-ggf2
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-59223
- https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/25949
- https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/commit/087878ce848a4d828012068b5997dac480f43656
- https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/releases/tag/v0.10.0
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-qg3f-8x3j-ggf2