CVE-2026-33663: n8n is Vulnerable to Credential Theft via Name-Based Resolution and Permission Checker Bypass in Community Edition

Impact

An authenticated user with the global:member role could exploit chained authorization flaws in n8n's credential pipeline to steal plaintext secrets from generic HTTP credentials (httpBasicAuth, httpHeaderAuth, httpQueryAuth) belonging to other users on the same instance.

The attack abuses a name-based credential resolution path that does not enforce ownership or project scope, combined with a bypass in the credentials permission checker that causes generic HTTP credential types to be skipped during pre-execution validation. Together, these flaws allow a member-role user to resolve another user's credential ID and execute a workflow that decrypts and uses that credential without authorization.

Native integration credential types (e.g. slackApi, openAiApi, postgres) are not affected by this issue.

This vulnerability affects Community Edition only. Enterprise Edition has additional permission gates on workflow creation and execution that independently block this attack chain.

Patches

The issue has been fixed in n8n versions 1.123.27, 2.13.3, and 2.14.1. 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 instance access to fully trusted users only.
• Audit credentials stored on the instance and rotate any generic HTTP credentials (httpBasicAuth, httpHeaderAuth, httpQueryAuth) that may have been exposed.

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