Open WebUI: POST /api/v1/images/edit bypasses the global image-edit switch and the per-user image-generation permission

Overview

Summary

POST /api/v1/images/edit performed no authorization beyond requiring a verified account. Every other image-editing surface in Open WebUI enforces the global image-edit switch and the per-user image-generation permission — the /api/v1/images/generations route, the built-in edit_image tool, and the chat image-edit middleware — but the direct edit route enforced neither. A verified non-admin user could therefore invoke server-side image editing, reaching the configured image-edit provider with the administrator's credentials, even when the administrator had globally disabled image editing (ENABLE_IMAGE_EDIT=False) or denied that user image-generation permission. The image-editing UI is surfaced only to administrators (Playground), so the route additionally exposed an admin-only capability to any verified user.

Impact

An authenticated, non-admin user can:

• bypass the global ENABLE_IMAGE_EDIT=False administrator control;
• bypass a denied per-user/group features.image_generation permission;
• cause the server to send billable image-edit requests to the configured provider (OpenAI-compatible, Gemini, or ComfyUI) using administrator-configured credentials (IMAGES_EDIT_OPENAI_API_KEY for the OpenAI engine).

No cross-user data is exposed and the provider credentials are never returned to the caller; the impact is the control/permission bypass and the associated billable resource consumption.

Affected Versions

>= 0.8.11, < 0.10.0 (the /api/v1/images/edit route was introduced in 0.8.11 and was ungated from the outset). Fixed in v0.10.0.

Details

/api/v1/images/generations enforces ENABLE_IMAGE_GENERATION (403 if globally disabled) and features.image_generation (403 for non-admins without the permission). The edit_image built-in tool and the chat image-edit middleware likewise gate on ENABLE_IMAGE_EDIT and features.image_generation. The direct POST /api/v1/images/edit route ran on Depends(get_verified_user) alone and proceeded straight to provider dispatch, applying none of these controls.

Proof of Concept

As a verified non-admin user, with image editing globally disabled (ENABLE_IMAGE_EDIT=False) or features.image_generation denied for the user:

POST /api/v1/images/edit
Authorization: Bearer <non_admin_user_token>
Content-Type: application/json

{"image":"data:image/png;base64,<png>","prompt":"edit","model":"gpt-image-1"}

The request reaches the configured image-edit provider and returns an edited image despite the disabled control/permission.

Patch

The direct route is split from its shared implementation (mirroring generate_images/image_generations): a thin /edit route now enforces ENABLE_IMAGE_EDIT and the per-user features.image_generation permission before delegating to the shared image_edits() implementation. The internal callers (the edit_image tool and the chat middleware) call the implementation directly and already gate themselves, so they are unaffected.

Affected packages

• open-webui >= 0.8.11, < 0.10.0

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• open-webui 0.10.0