How should we interpret CVSS severity scores?

CVSS estimates technical severity, but it does not automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, asset criticality, known exploitation, and whether compensating controls exist. A Medium CVSS on an exposed production system can be more urgent than a Critical on an isolated non-production host.

Vulnerability Database

Q: What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

Q: What's the difference between a vulnerability, an exploit, and a zero-day?

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. Risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Q: Why do vulnerabilities keep reappearing in our environment?

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete asset discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host.

Q: How do we prioritize remediation without burning out the team?

Use a repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress so remediation is steady, not reactive.

Q: How can SynScan help reduce vulnerability risk over time?

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361,925

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2026-52822 — kimai / kimai

Improper Authorization

Summary

Kimai 2.56.0 contains an authenticated authorization bypass in the timesheet restart and duplicate workflows. After a user loses access to a project, the user can still derive a new timesheet from one of their historical entries and create a new record under that now-unauthorized project and activity combination.

This is a permission revocation bypass with persistent write impact. The issue affects both restart and duplicate, which trust ownership of an old timesheet more than the user's current access to the underlying project, activity, and customer.

Details

The issue affects the following operations:

PATCH /api/timesheets/{id}/restart
PATCH /api/timesheets/{id}/duplicate

The root cause is that authorization gives too much weight to the fact that the original timesheet belongs to the current user. In src/Voter/TimesheetVoter.php, the *_own_timesheet branch is evaluated before team-based access checks.

The restart/duplicate capability check also verifies only object visibility, not whether the current user still has team-based access to the referenced objects.

In src/API/TimesheetController.php, the restart flow copies the historical project and activity into a new candidate timesheet.

The duplicate flow similarly clones the historical record and saves it.

In src/Timesheet/TimesheetService.php, creation of a new running entry still relies on isGranted('start', $timesheet).

For historical entries that belong to the current user, this logic can still succeed through the *_own_timesheet branch even after project access has been revoked. As a result, normal creation pages correctly stop offering the revoked project, but restart and duplicate can still create new records under it.

The same weakness also affects the Web duplicate flow because the UI path ultimately calls the same save logic in src/Controller/TimesheetAbstractController.php:

A PoC was provided, but removed for security reasons.

Impact

This vulnerability allows a user to keep writing new time entries into a project after project access has been revoked. That undermines administrative access-control changes and can pollute project time tracking, budget calculations, statistics, reports, and invoicing workflows.

Because both restart and duplicate can reuse historical project/activity bindings, old timesheet records effectively become reusable capability tokens that survive later access-control changes. This is not a UI artifact or a caching problem: new database rows are persisted after revocation.

Solution

The metoid TimesheetVoter::canStart() now checks team access for project and activity. This verification is used for new timesheets and also for the duplication and restart workflows.

See https://www.kimai.org/en/security/ghsa-c6w6-57jj-62vh for more information.

Published: Jul 14, 2026
Updated: Jul 14, 2026
CVE: CVE-2026-52822
GHSA: GHSA-c6w6-57jj-62vh
Severity: Medium
Exploit:
CISA KEV:

No technical information available.

CWEs:

OWASP TOP 10:

A5 - Broken Access Control

Affected Software
References

Software	From	Fixed in
kimai / kimai	-	2.58.0

https://github.com/kimai/kimai/security/advisories/GHSA-c6w6-57jj-62vh

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.