Coder: User-admin role can reset owner account password

Overview

Summary

The PUT /api/v2/users/{user}/password endpoint authorized only ActionUpdatePersonal and did not prevent a user-admin from resetting an owner account's password. It also did not require the current password when an admin reset another user's password.

Note: Exploitation requires the privileged user-admin role so practical risk is limited to deployments that grant user-admin to less trusted operators.

Impact

A user-admin could reset any owner's password without knowing it, authenticate as that owner and gain full deployment control, including templates, workspaces, licensing, organization settings and the ability to self-assign the owner role. This was a privilege escalation from user-admin to owner.

Patches

The fix prevents non-owner users from resetting the password of an account that holds the owner role.

The fix was backported to all supported release lines:

Workarounds

Restrict the user-admin role to trusted administrators until upgrading.

Resources

• Fix: #25709

Credits

Coder would like to thank Anthropic's Security Team (ANT-2026-22436) for independently disclosing this issue!

Affected packages

• github.com/coder/coder/v2 >= 2.34.0, < 2.34.2
• github.com/coder/coder/v2 >= 2.33.0, < 2.33.8
• github.com/coder/coder/v2 >= 2.30.0, < 2.32.7
• github.com/coder/coder/v2 < 2.29.17

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• github.com/coder/coder/v2 2.34.2
• github.com/coder/coder/v2 2.33.8
• github.com/coder/coder/v2 2.32.7
• github.com/coder/coder/v2 2.29.17