Grafana CVE-2025-6023: Chained Open Redirect to XSS – Technical Breakdown and Patch Guidance

When a single crafted URL can turn your trusted observability dashboard into an attacker’s launchpad, the stakes for patching become existential. That’s the reality for organizations running Grafana OSS versions 11.5.0 and above, where CVE-2025-6023 enables chained open redirect and XSS attacks with potentially severe consequences for monitoring infrastructure and credentials.

Grafana, the world’s most popular open-source observability platform, powers dashboards for thousands of enterprises and cloud-native stacks. Its extensibility and ubiquity make it a prime target for attackers seeking to pivot from monitoring to compromise. This post delivers a technical breakdown of CVE-2025-6023, patch and detection guidance, and a look at Grafana’s security response.

Technical Information

CVE-2025-6023 is rooted in Grafana OSS’s client-side routing logic, introduced in v11.5.0, which failed to adequately sanitize user-supplied paths. This oversight allowed attackers to craft URLs containing path traversal sequences (../) or double slashes (//) that bypassed intended navigation controls. When a victim visited such a URL, Grafana could redirect them to an attacker-controlled site or load malicious resources, setting the stage for XSS.

Vulnerability Mechanism:

Open Redirect: By manipulating the path component of a URL, an attacker could force Grafana to redirect users to arbitrary external domains. For example, a URL like https://grafana.example.com/public/../attacker.com/%3f/../.. could, after browser normalization, cause a redirect to attacker.com.
Chaining with Path Traversal: If chained with path traversal, the flaw could be used to load external scripts or resources, enabling execution of attacker-supplied JavaScript in the context of the Grafana session (XSS). This is especially dangerous if the attacker can inject or control plugin resources.

Attack Vectors:

Session Hijack: If a victim is authenticated, successful XSS can exfiltrate session cookies (e.g., grafana_session), leading to account takeover.
Privilege Escalation: Attackers may leverage XSS to modify user settings or escalate privileges, especially if the victim has admin or editor rights.
SSRF Potential: If the Grafana Image Renderer plugin is enabled, XSS could be chained to trigger server-side requests.

Affected Code Pattern: While the exact vulnerable code is not public, the root cause is improper sanitization of navigation paths. A secure implementation must strip traversal sequences and restrict redirects to trusted domains.

// Pseudo-code for input path sanitization
func sanitizePath(inputPath string) string {
    // Remove any path traversal characters
    sanitizedPath := strings.ReplaceAll(inputPath, "../", "")
    // Further sanitization logic
    return sanitizedPath
}

Patch Information

To address CVE-2025-6023, Grafana Labs released patches in the following versions:

12.0.2+security-01
11.6.3+security-01
11.5.6+security-01
11.4.6+security-01
11.3.8+security-01

Patch Details:

Sanitizing Input Paths: Strict validation and sanitization of user-supplied paths to prevent traversal beyond intended directories.
Restricting Redirects: Redirects are now limited to trusted and predefined URLs, blocking navigation to attacker-controlled domains.
Enhanced Content Security Policy (CSP): CSP rules have been tightened to restrict script sources and mitigate unauthorized script execution.

Code Example:

// Pseudo-code for redirect validation
func validateRedirectURL(url string) bool {
    allowedDomains := []string{"trusted-domain.com", "another-trusted.com"}
    for _, domain := range allowedDomains {
        if strings.Contains(url, domain) {
            return true
        }
    }
    return false
}

Upgrade Guidance: Upgrade instructions are available in the Grafana Upgrade Documentation. Applying these patches is the only reliable mitigation.

Patch sources:

Detection Methods

Detecting exploitation of CVE-2025-6023 (and the related CVE-2025-6197) requires monitoring for suspicious redirects and anomalous URL patterns:

Unusual Redirects: Log and alert on any user navigation that results in redirects to external domains not whitelisted by your organization.
Suspicious URL Patterns: Watch for URLs containing encoded characters or traversal sequences (../, %2e%2e/, etc.), which may indicate exploit attempts.
Enhanced Logging: Enable detailed HTTP request logging in Grafana, capturing full URLs, referrer headers, and user agent strings for forensic analysis.
Alerting: Set up anomaly detection for spikes in redirects or patterns matching known exploit attempts.

Reference: Grafana Security Release – CVE-2025-6023

Affected Systems and Versions

Products: Grafana OSS

Affected Versions:

Grafana OSS v11.5.0 up to (but not including) 12.0.2+security-01
Also affects 11.6.x before 11.6.3+security-01, 11.5.x before 11.5.6+security-01, 11.4.x before 11.4.6+security-01, and 11.3.x before 11.3.8+security-01

Vulnerable Configurations:

All default installations of affected versions
Increased risk if anonymous access is enabled or if users have editor/admin privileges

Vendor Security History

Grafana Labs has a strong reputation for timely security patching and transparent advisories. Over the past year, several high-severity vulnerabilities (such as CVE-2025-4123 and CVE-2025-3260) have been disclosed and patched rapidly, often within weeks of discovery. However, the recurrence of client-side XSS and redirect vulnerabilities suggests persistent challenges in the platform’s routing and input validation logic. Grafana’s incident response includes detailed post-incident reviews and coordinated disclosures, reflecting a mature security posture.

References

Source: This report was created using AI

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