CVE-2026-44883: Portainer: JWT accepted in URL query leaks tokens to logs and referers

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-44883 is a high (CVSS 7.7) vulnerability in portainer. EPSS estimates a 0.29% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 21.6% of scored vulnerabilities. 1 public exploit is recorded.

Timeline

1. 28-05-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 02-06-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Portainer Community Edition is a lightweight service delivery platform for containerized applications that can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes and ACI environments. From 2.33.0 to before 2.33.8, 2.39.2, and 2.41.0, Portainer's authentication middleware accepts JWT bearer tokens passed as the ?token=<JWT> URL query parameter on any authenticated API endpoint, in addition to the standard Authorization: Bearer header. URLs are recorded in reverse-proxy access logs, browser history, and HTTP Referer headers on outbound navigation, so any JWT passed this way can be harvested by anyone with access to those logs or by an external site the user subsequently visits. A leaked token grants the full privileges of the user it was issued to, until the token expires (default 8 hours, configurable). The ?token= parameter was used by Portainer's browser-based container attach, exec, and pod shell features, so any user with exec or attach rights on a container was exposed — not only administrators. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.33.8, 2.39.2, and 2.41.0.

• CWE-598Use of HTTP Request With Sensitive Query StringThe web application uses an HTTP method to process a request, but the request includes sensitive information in the query string.