MinIO is a high-performance object storage system. Starting in RELEASE.2023-05-18T00-05-36Z and prior to RELEASE.2026-04-11T03-20-12Z, an authentication bypass vulnerability in MinIO's Snowball auto-extract handler (PutObjectExtractHandler) allows any user who knows a valid access key to write arbitrary objects to any bucket without knowing the secret key or providing a valid cryptographic signature. Any MinIO deployment is impacted.

The attack requires only a valid access key (the well-known default minioadmin, or any key with WRITE permission on a bucket) and a target bucket name. When authTypeStreamingUnsignedTrailer support was added, the new auth type was handled in PutObjectHandler and PutObjectPartHandler but was never added to PutObjectExtractHandler. The snowball auto-extract handler's switch rAuthType block has no case for authTypeStreamingUnsignedTrailer, so execution falls through with zero signature verification.

The isPutActionAllowed call before the switch extracts the access key and checks IAM permissions, but does not verify the cryptographic signature. An attacker sends a PUT request with X-Amz-Content-Sha256: STREAMING-UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD-TRAILER, X-Amz-Meta-Snowball-Auto-Extract: true, and an Authorization header containing a valid access key with a completely fabricated signature. The request is accepted and the tar payload is extracted into the bucket.

Users of the open-source minio/minio project should upgrade to MinIO AIStor RELEASE.2026-04-11T03-20-12Z or later. If upgrading is not immediately possible, block unsigned-trailer requests at the load balancer. Reject any request containing X-Amz-Content-Sha256: STREAMING-UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD-TRAILER at the reverse proxy or WAF layer.

Clients can use STREAMING-AWS4-HMAC-SHA256-PAYLOAD-TRAILER (the signed variant) instead. Alternatively, restrict WRITE permissions. Limit s3:PutObject grants to trusted principals.

While this reduces the attack surface, it does not eliminate the vulnerability since any user with WRITE permission can exploit it with only their access key.