Scheduled Report Authorization Flaw Enables Cross-User Dashboard Data Disclosure

During security research on an enterprise infrastructure monitoring platform, I investigated the authorization controls surrounding scheduled dashboard reports.

The research focused on how the platform determines which user's permissions are applied when generating a scheduled report.

I identified a potential privilege escalation scenario in which a lower-privileged user could specify another user's identity as the dashboard rendering context, resulting in the generation of a report containing data outside the requester's authorized visibility.

The behavior was reproduced in a controlled, locally deployed environment.

Technical Concept:

The application separates two concepts:

• Report owner: The user who creates and manages a scheduled report.
• Rendering identity: The user whose permissions are applied when generating dashboard content.

This separation requires careful authorization enforcement.

During testing, I observed that the report creation workflow accepted a user-supplied rendering identity without adequately restricting the selected identity to the requester's authorized scope.

Testing Methodology:

I used two accounts with different permission levels:

A restricted administrative account with limited host-group visibility. A higher-privileged account with broader dashboard visibility.

The restricted account was first tested through the normal monitoring interface to establish its actual access boundaries.

I then examined the scheduled reporting workflow and compared the generated dashboard output against the data available to the restricted account.

Observed Impact:

The generated report contained monitoring information that the restricted account could not access through its own normal dashboard permissions.

This demonstrated a potential cross-privilege information disclosure issue involving the scheduled reporting workflow.

Security Lessons:

Report ownership and rendering permissions must be independently authorized. User-controlled identity parameters require strict server-side validation. Automated reporting features can introduce privilege escalation paths when they execute actions under another user's permission context. Authorization testing should include comparisons between direct access and background-generated content.

Disclosure Status:

The research was independently submitted through a vulnerability disclosure program. The report was marked as a duplicate.

The affected product and identifying technical details are intentionally omitted while disclosure considerations remain unresolved.