Vikunja Affected by TOTP Brute-Force Due to Non-Functional Account Lockout

Vikunja is an open-source self-hosted task management platform. Prior to 2.3.0, the TOTP failed-attempt lockout mechanism is non-functional due to a database transaction handling bug. When a TOTP validation fails, the login handler in pkg/routes/api/v1/login.go calls HandleFailedTOTPAuth and then unconditionally rolls back. HandleFailedTOTPAuth in pkg/user/totp.go uses an in-memory counter (key-value store) to track failed attempts. When the counter reaches 10, it calls user.SetStatus(s, StatusAccountLocked) on the same database session s. Because the login handler always rolls back after a TOTP failure, the StatusAccountLocked write is undone. The in-memory counter correctly increments past 10, so the lockout code executes on every subsequent attempt, but the database write is rolled back every time. This allows unlimited brute-force attempts against TOTP codes. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.3.0.

Source published

10 Apr 2026 16:03:19 UTC

Source modified

13 Apr 2026 15:37:11 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 3.1 · 5.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N