CVE-2026-72914: Mastodon

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 0.8% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. Prior to 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1, the administrative statistics endpoints handled by Api::V1::Admin::MeasuresController and Api::V1::Admin::RetentionController checked authorization only after beginning expensive calculations. Anonymous callers could submit keys, start_at, and end_at parameters that caused long-running SQL queries in Admin::Metrics::Measure, Admin::Metrics::Retention, and Admin::Metrics::Dimension::BaseDimension, allowing repeated requests to exhaust server resources. This issue is fixed in versions 4.4.21, 4.5.14, 4.6.4, and 4.7.0-beta.1.

Affected products

• Mastodon Mastodon: before 4.4.21 (fixed in 4.4.21); from 4.5.0-beta.1, before 4.5.14 (fixed in 4.5.14); from 4.6.0-beta.1, before 4.6.4 (fixed in 4.6.4)

Published 2026-08-10. Last modified 2026-09-09.