Kirby is an open-source content management system. Prior to versions 4.9.0 and 5.4.0, Kirby's user permissions control which user role is allowed to perform specific actions to content models in the CMS. These permissions are defined for each role in the user blueprint (site/blueprints/users/...).

It is also possible to customize the permissions for each target model in the model blueprints (such as in site/blueprints/pages/...) using the options feature. The permissions and options together control the authorization of user actions. For pages, Kirby provides the pages.create and pages.changeStatus permissions (among others).

In affected releases, Kirby checked these permissions independently and only for the respective action. However the changeStatus permission didn't take effect on page creation. New pages are created as drafts by default and need to be published by changing the page status of an existing page draft.

This is ensured when the page is created via the Kirby Panel. However the REST API allows to override the isDraft flag when creating a new page. This allowed authenticated attackers with the pages.create permission to immediately create published pages, bypassing the normal editorial workflow.

The problem has been patched in Kirby 4.9.0 and Kirby 5.4.0. Kirby has updated the Options logic to no longer double-resolve queries in option values coming from OptionsQuery or OptionsApi sources. Kirby now only resolves queries that are directly configured in the blueprints.