n8n Has External Secrets Authorization Bypass in Credential Saving

Impact

An authenticated user without permission to list external secrets could reference a secret by the external name in a credential and retrieve its plaintext value when saving the credential. This bypassed the externalSecret:list permission check and allowed access to secrets stored in connected vaults without admin or owner privileges.

• This issue requires the instance to have an external secrets vault configured.
• The attacker must know or be able to guess the name of a target secret.

Patches

The issue has been fixed in n8n versions 1.123.23 and 2.6.4. Users should upgrade to one of these versions or later to remediate the vulnerability.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not immediately possible, administrators should consider the following temporary mitigations:

• Restrict n8n access to fully trusted users only.
• Disable external secrets integration until the patch can be applied.

These workarounds do not fully remediate the risk and should only be used as short-term mitigation measures.