Summary
Workarounds
All installations between v8.0 and v8.2.3 that have fine-grained access control beta enabled and more than one organization should be upgraded as soon as possible. If you cannot upgrade, you should turn off the fine-grained access control using a feature flag.
Grafana Cloud instances have not been affected by the vulnerability.
Reporting security issues
If you think you have found a security vulnerability, please send a report to [email protected]. This address can be used for all of Grafana Labs' open source and commercial products (including, but not limited to Grafana, Grafana Cloud, Grafana Enterprise, and grafana.com). We can accept only vulnerability reports at this address. We would prefer that you encrypt your message to us by using our PGP key. The key fingerprint is
F988 7BEA 027A 049F AE8E 5CAA D125 8932 BE24 C5CA
The key is available from keyserver.ubuntu.com.
Security announcements
We maintain a security category on our blog, where we will always post a summary, remediation, and mitigation details for any patch containing security fixes.
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Impact
On Nov. 2, during an internal security audit, we discovered that when the fine-grained access control beta feature is enabled and there is more than one organization in the Grafana instance, Grafana 8.0 introduced a mechanism which allowed users with the Organization Admin role to list, add, remove, and update users’ roles in other organizations in which they are not an admin.
The application does not correctly enforce access controls, allowing a principal to access resources or operations beyond their granted permissions. Typical impact: unauthorized data access or execution of privileged operations.
CVE-2021-41244 has a CVSS score of 9.1 (Critical). The vector is network-reachable, high privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (8.2.4); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.
Affected versions
Security releases
Kodem intelligence
Severity tells you how bad this could be in the worst case. It does not tell you whether you are exposed. Exploitability and impact are functions of runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A vulnerable package can sit in your dependency tree and never run.
Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter. Kodem's runtime-powered SCA identifies whether this CVE is reachable in your applications.
Remediation advice
Fixed in 8.2.4
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is CVE-2021-41244? CVE-2021-41244 is a critical-severity incorrect authorization vulnerability in github.com/grafana/grafana (go), affecting versions >= 8.0.0, < 8.2.4. It is fixed in 8.2.4. The application does not correctly enforce access controls, allowing a principal to access resources or operations beyond their granted permissions.
- How severe is CVE-2021-41244? CVE-2021-41244 has a CVSS score of 9.1 (Critical). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
- Which versions of github.com/grafana/grafana are affected by CVE-2021-41244? github.com/grafana/grafana (go) versions >= 8.0.0, < 8.2.4 is affected.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2021-41244? Yes. CVE-2021-41244 is fixed in 8.2.4. Upgrade to this version or later.
- Is CVE-2021-41244 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2021-41244 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
- What actually determines whether CVE-2021-41244 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
- How do I fix CVE-2021-41244? Upgrade
github.com/grafana/grafanato 8.2.4 or later.