Live Exposure Defense: From CVE to Confirmed Exposure in 12 Hours – See more

Back
New CVE Detected

CVE-2026-85391 – Authentication Bypass via Hardcoded JWT Secret – Peppermint ≤ 0.5.5

Be the first to know when new zero-days emerge:

Subscribe to Email Alerts
Subscribe to RSS Feed

Summary

CVE-2026-85391 is a critical Use of Hard-coded Credentials vulnerability (CWE-798) affecting Peppermint, an open-source, self-hosted ticket management system by Peppermint-Lab. The application’s Docker Compose deployment configuration ships with a hardcoded value for the SECRET environment variable, which is used directly as the key for signing and verifying JSON Web Tokens. Because this value is publicly known and identical across default deployments, an unauthenticated attacker can forge valid session tokens for arbitrary user accounts, including administrators.

Technical details

  • Root cause: the docker-compose.yml shipped with Peppermint sets a static, publicly visible value for the SECRET environment variable (e.g. peppermint4life in the public repository configuration).
  • The API’s token verification logic (apps/api/src/lib/jwt.ts) reads this SECRET value from the environment, base64-decodes it, and uses the resulting buffer directly as the HMAC key passed to jwt.verify().
  • Any deployment that does not override this default at install time uses the same signing key as every other default deployment.
  • Attack vector: network, no authentication or user interaction required. An attacker who knows the default secret can construct a JWT for any user ID and present it as a valid bearer token.
  • Impact: full authentication bypass, enabling impersonation of any user (including admins) and access to protected API endpoints, resulting in complete loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability for affected instances.

Affected software

  • Peppermint (Peppermint-Lab), all versions through 0.5.5, when deployed with the default/unmodified SECRET value from the provided docker-compose.yml.

Severity

  • CVSS 3.1 Base Score: 9.8 (CRITICAL) — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
  • CVSS 4.0 Score: 9.3 (CRITICAL) — CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Mitigation and recommended actions

  • Immediate: no fixed release version has been confirmed by the vendor at time of writing. Administrators should not rely on a future patch alone.
  • Workaround: replace the default SECRET value in docker-compose.yml (or the equivalent environment configuration) with a long, randomly generated, unique secret before deploying, and rotate it immediately on any existing deployment that has been running with the default value.
  • Rotating the secret invalidates all existing sessions; force re-authentication for all users after rotation.
  • Restrict direct network exposure of the Peppermint API/admin interface where possible, and monitor for unexpected authenticated API activity as an interim detection measure.
  • Track the vendor’s GitHub repository and issue tracker for an official fix and upgrade to a patched release once available.

How IONIX identifies potentially affected assets

IONIX matches the following signal against data already collected when it crawled the asset; identifying the technology sends no request beyond that crawl.

  • Meta tag description: Ticket management system, self-hosted, open source

References

Are you exposed?

Get a free report of your organization’s exposure to this CVE and threat

  • Mapping of all Assets with this Technology
  • Identification of potentially exposed assets to this CVE
  • Confirmation of verified exploitable assets
Get Exposure Report

How IONIX’s External Exposure Management Platform Detects and Validates
Zero-Days to Shrink MTTR

1

Map your entire attack surface (continously)

IONIX uses multi-factor discovery methods, including DNS analysis, certificate mapping, metadata inspection, and more, to automatically map every internet-facing asset across your environment. This includes cloud instances, third-party platforms, shadow IT, and even forgotten infrastructure that traditional tools miss.

2

Monitor for new CVEs

Dozens of threat intel feeds using agentic technology are continuously analyzed to detect the appearance of proof-of-concept code, exploit kits, and indicators of active targeting. IONIX goes further by applying AI to proactively evaluate whether emerging vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited, even before PoCs go public.

3

Identify Potential External Exposures

Not all CVEs matter. IONIX filters vulnerabilities by asking attacker-centric questions: Can it be reached from the internet? Does it require authentication? Is it being exploited in the wild? This dramatically reduces noise and focuses teams on threats that can actually be weaponized.

4

Create Safe, Scalable Exploit Validations

IONIX transforms real-world PoCs into safe, non-intrusive test payloads that can be run in production environments without disruption. These simulations are precisely targeted to the systems that are vulnerable, ensuring rapid validation without unnecessary load.

5

Execute Exploit Validations

By combining context about software stack, versioning, exposure status, and reachability, IONIX ensures that only the right payloads are executed against the right assets, maximizing efficiency and minimizing risk.

6

Drive Fast and Actionable Remediation

Results are routed through integrations with ticketing, SOAR, and SIEM tools. Issues are written in plain language, bundled into remediation clusters, and prioritized based on asset criticality, exploitability, and blast radius. This shortens mean time to remediation (MTTR) and empowers teams to act with confidence.

Are you exposed?

Get a free report of your organization’s exposure to this CVE and threat

  • Mapping of all Assets with this Technology
  • Identification of potentially exposed assets to this CVE
  • Confirmation of verified exploitable assets
Get Exposure Report
Close

Subscribe to Threat Center RSS

Copy/paste the link below into your preferred RSS reader or follow these instructions to subscribe to Slack alerts.

Open RSS feedSlack setup instructions

Close

Get Real-Time CVE Alerts to Your Email

Be the first to know when new zero-days emerge