CVE-2026-14644: Sonatype Nexus Repository Manager Security Vulnerability (CVSS 8.6)

A vulnerability was identified in Sonatype Nexus Repository 3 in which two blobstore group management REST API endpoints did not correctly enforce the intended authorization check. A user granted only the nexus:blobstores:create permission could invoke these endpoints to convert an existing blobstore into a group blobstore, an action that should require the nexus:blobstores:update permission instead. This could result in unauthorized modification of blobstore configuration without administrator approval. The nexus:blobstores:create permission is a named permission that must be explicitly granted by an administrator; it is not held by default.

In affected versions of Nexus Repository 3, the script execution endpoint (POST /service/rest/v1/script/{name}/run) did not verify whether script execution had been administratively disabled. An account holding script-execution permission could continue to run previously-created scripts even after an administrator set nexus.scripts.allowCreation=false, undermining the expectation that this setting fully blocks script execution.

Nexus Repository 3 did not sufficiently restrict which HikariCP connection-pool properties could be set through the DataStore configuration API. A user holding the nx-datastores-update permission could set the connectionInitSql property to execute arbitrary SQL against the configured database on every new connection. On the default H2 database backend, this could be leveraged to achieve remote code execution as the Nexus process user.

A user holding a permission to update privilege definitions could modify a wildcard privilege already assigned to their own role to grant broader permissions than they were authorized to hold, including full administrative access, without any additional authorization check or role reassignment.

Sonatype Nexus Repository 3 did not immediately terminate a user's active login session or revoke their cached permissions when that user's account was deleted, deactivated, or had its password changed. A user whose account was already logged in at the time of one of these actions could continue using their existing session to interact with the repository as though the account were still active, until that session independently expired. Depending on the permissions previously held, this could allow continued unauthorized access to read, modify, or delete repository content after access was intended to be revoked.

An account holding the nexus:settings:update permission in Nexus Repository 3 (or the equivalent nexus:settings permission in the legacy Nexus Repository 2) could submit arbitrary values as realm identifiers through an internal configuration API that did not validate them against the set of registered realms. Because unrecognized entries were persisted and re-evaluated on every realm load via a legacy code path, this could result in unintended code executing inside the Nexus Repository process, and in some cases a persistent authentication lockout that was not visible through the administrative UI.