Security Advisory 2026-11

Summary Unicode equivalence bypass
Advisory Number 2026-11
Discovery Date 04 SEP 2026
Patch Release Date 08 SEP 2026
Advisory Release Date 30 SEP 2026
Product Octopus Server
Operating System Linux and Microsoft Windows
Severity High
CVE ID CVE-2026-102478

Customers who have downloaded and installed any of the Octopus Server versions listed below ("Details") are affected.

Please upgrade your Octopus Server immediately to fix this vulnerability.

Customers who have upgraded Octopus Server to version 2026.3.15816 or higher are not affected.

Severity

Octopus Deploy has given this vulnerability a High rating. This rating was given according to the Octopus Deploy severity levels, which ranks vulnerabilities as critical, high, medium, or low severity.

This is our assessment and you should evaluate its applicability to your own environment.

Details

In affected versions of Octopus Server, an authenticated user with permission to modify roles could bypass the protections preventing access abuse resulting in privilege escalation. It was possible for the built-in role to be weakened and the attacker's account added to a privileged team. This was achievable due to improper validation of unsafe equivalence in inputs.

The versions of Octopus Server affected by this vulnerability are:

  • All 2023.2.x versions after 2023.2.945
  • All 2023.3.x, 2023.4.x, 2024.x, 2025.x
  • All 2026.1.x versions before 2026.1.11768
  • All 2026.2.x versions before 2026.2.13408
  • All 2026.3.x versions before 2026.3.15816
  • All 2026.4.x versions before 2026.4.1480

At the time of the release of the fix, 2026.4.x is only available on Octopus Cloud.

Octopus Cloud customers do not need to take any further action as all instances have been updated to the patched version.

Fix

To address this vulnerability, we have released Octopus Server version:

  • 2026.1.11768
  • 2026.2.13408
  • 2026.3.15816

The latest versions of Octopus Deploy products can be downloaded from https://octopus.com/downloads and previous versions can be downloaded from https://octopus.com/downloads/previous

What You Need to Do

Octopus Deploy recommends that you upgrade to the latest version (2026.3.15875). You can download the latest version of Octopus Server from https://octopus.com/downloads

If you can't upgrade to the latest version (2026.3.15875):

If you have feature version... ...then upgrade to this version
2023.2.x 2023.3.x, 2023.4.x, 2024.x, 2025.x 2026.1.11768 or greater
2026.1.x 2026.1.11768 or greater
2026.2.x 2026.2.13408 or greater
2026.3.x 2026.3.15816 or greater

Mitigation

There is no known mitigation for CVE-2026-102478, it is important to upgrade to a fixed version as soon as possible.

Support

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this advisory, please contact our support team https://octopus.com/support.

Exploitation and Public Announcements

The Octopus Deploy security team is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory.

Source

This vulnerability was found during internal testing by Nathan Willoughby at Octopus Deploy