Vulnerability · Published Mar 3, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2026-27981HomeBox has an Auth Rate Limit Bypass via IP Spoofing
High 7.4
In plain English
A high-severity security flaw in homebox from sysadminsmedia. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 23% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
HomeBox is a home inventory and organization system. Prior to 0.24.0, the authentication rate limiter (authRateLimiter) tracks failed attempts per client IP. It determines the client IP by reading, 1. X-Real-IP header, 2. First entry of X-Forwarded-For header, and 3. r.RemoteAddr (TCP connection address). These headers were read unconditionally. An attacker connecting directly to Homebox could forge any value in X-Real-IP, effectively getting a fresh rate limit identity per request. There is a TrustProxy option in the configuration (Options.TrustProxy, default false), but this option was never read by any middleware or rate limiter code. Additionally, chi's middleware.RealIP was applied unconditionally in main.go, overwriting r.RemoteAddr with the forged header value before it reaches any handler. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.24.0.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| sysadminsmedia | homebox | < 0.24.0 |
Weakness: CWE-307 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N