Attackers Chain Two JFrog Artifactory Bugs to Forge Admin Tokens

Attackers chained two authentication flaws in JFrog's Artifactory, a package registry many software teams use to store the outputs of their build pipelines, to mint themselves administrator tokens in as little as five minutes, according to a Wiz Research report published Sept. 10.

A third, unrelated bug in the same product lets an attacker skip the chain and go straight to administrator access with a single request.

Two flaws, one token, five minutes to admin

The first flaw, CVE-2026-42018, is an authentication bypass. A POST request to /access/api/v1/aws/token/, with a trailing slash added to the path, returns an internal anonymous-user JSON Web Token even on servers where anonymous access has been turned off. Wiz said attackers then exchanged that token for an administrator-scoped one by exploiting CVE-2026-42016, a flaw in how Artifactory validates a token's authorized scope rather than just its signature and issuer. From there, a PUT request to /api/security/users/<username> creates a persistent admin account. Wiz said the full sequence, from first request to new administrator account, completed in under five minutes in some of the intrusions it tracked between Aug. 15 and Sept. 8.

CVE-2026-82329 needed neither flaw

A third bug, CVE-2026-82329, is rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS severity scale and requires no prior authentication at all. A single POST request to /access/api/v1/registry/join returns an administrator token directly. CISA added CVE-2026-82329 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog Sept. 2, and Wiz said the content delivery network Fastly counted roughly 406,000 exploitation attempts against it in the days after. Attackers who got in through either path deployed malicious Groovy plugins for code execution, dropped Rust-based backdoors with command-and-control functions, and pulled Artifactory's cluster join key, the shared secret its nodes use to trust each other. Some created admin accounts named to blend in with legitimate service accounts, including one styled "jfrog-distribution."

JFrog's interim workaround for CVE-2026-82329, published alongside its advisory, is to add a random value as an extra join key in system.yaml, which causes the server to reject registration requests signed with the old one.

What is still open after six weeks

JFrog has shipped fixes across six release branches; the current patched versions are 7.111.21, 7.117.28, 7.125.20, 7.133.29, 7.146.38 and 7.161.20. Cloud customers needed no action. By Sept. 10, when Wiz published its findings, 59 percent of the Artifactory servers it scanned remained open to CVE-2026-42016, 62 percent to CVE-2026-42018, and 49 percent to CVE-2026-82329, the critical-rated flaw whose faster patch rate Wiz attributed to its severity score.

One of the three flaws, CVE-2026-42016, was credited by Wiz to security researchers at OpenAI, putting an AI lab's infrastructure team in the disclosure chain for a chained registry takeover rather than a model release. JFrog has not said whether patching a server reverses administrator accounts and tokens an attacker minted before the update was applied.

The chain follows other recent supply-chain flaws disclosed against developer infrastructure and the governance fight over trust in open-source tooling more broadly. Organizations running self-hosted Artifactory that have not applied the September fixes remain exposed to both the chained bypass and the single-request one.

CVE	Flaw	Still exposed, Sept. 10
CVE-2026-42016	Token scope validation	59%
CVE-2026-42018	Anonymous token leak	62%
CVE-2026-82329	Unauthenticated join bypass	49%