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

If you run Grafana OSS 11.5.0 or later, a single crafted URL can turn your trusted observability dashboard into an attacker's launchpad, which makes patching urgent. 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. Because it is so extensible and so widely deployed, it is a prime target for attackers who want to pivot from monitoring to compromise. This post covers how the flaw works, which releases fix it, how to detect exploitation, and how Grafana has handled security issues in the past.

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Technical information

CVE-2025-6023 comes from the client-side routing logic introduced in Grafana OSS v11.5.0, which did not properly sanitize user-supplied paths. Attackers could craft URLs containing path traversal sequences (../) or double slashes (//) that slipped past the intended navigation controls. When a victim opened such a URL, Grafana could redirect them to an attacker-controlled site or load malicious resources, which is the first step toward XSS.

The attack starts with the open redirect. By manipulating the path component of a URL, an attacker could force Grafana to redirect users to arbitrary external domains. For example, after browser normalization, a URL like https://grafana.example.com/public/../attacker.com/%3f/../.. could send the user to attacker.com.

Chained with path traversal, the same flaw could be used to load external scripts or resources, so attacker-supplied JavaScript runs in the context of the Grafana session (XSS). This is most dangerous when the attacker can inject or control plugin resources.

What an attacker can do with the XSS depends on the victim and the configuration:

• If the victim is authenticated, successful XSS can exfiltrate session cookies (e.g., grafana_session) and lead to account takeover.
• Attackers may use the XSS to modify user settings or escalate privileges, especially if the victim has admin or editor rights.
• If the Grafana Image Renderer plugin is enabled, the XSS could be chained to trigger server-side requests (SSRF).

The exact vulnerable code is not public, but 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
}

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Patch information

Grafana Labs fixed CVE-2025-6023 in these releases:

• 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

The patches:

• strictly validate and sanitize user-supplied paths so they cannot traverse beyond intended directories
• limit redirects to trusted, predefined URLs, which blocks navigation to attacker-controlled domains
• tighten Content Security Policy (CSP) rules to restrict script sources and limit unauthorized script execution

A simplified example of redirect validation:

// 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
}

Applying these patches is the only reliable mitigation. The Grafana Upgrade Documentation has step-by-step upgrade instructions.

Patch sources:

• Grafana Security Release: CVE-2025-6023
• Grafana Upgrade Documentation

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Detection methods

To detect exploitation of CVE-2025-6023 and the related CVE-2025-6197, monitor for suspicious redirects and anomalous URL patterns:

• Log and alert on any user navigation that redirects to external domains your organization has not whitelisted.
• Watch for URLs containing encoded characters or traversal sequences (../, %2e%2e/, etc.), which may indicate exploit attempts.
• Enable detailed HTTP request logging in Grafana so you capture full URLs, referrer headers, and user agent strings for forensic analysis.
• Set up anomaly detection for spikes in redirects or for patterns matching known exploit attempts.

Reference: Grafana Security Release: CVE-2025-6023

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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
• Higher risk when anonymous access is enabled or users have editor or admin privileges

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Vendor security history

Grafana Labs has a strong reputation for patching security issues promptly and publishing transparent advisories. Over the past year, several high-severity vulnerabilities, including CVE-2025-4123 and CVE-2025-3260, have been disclosed and patched quickly, often within weeks of discovery. Its incident response includes detailed post-incident reviews and coordinated disclosures, and both point to a mature security posture. Still, client-side XSS and redirect bugs keep coming back, which suggests that the platform's routing and input validation logic remains a persistent weak spot.

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References

• NVD Entry for CVE-2025-6023
• Official CVE Entry
• Grafana Security Advisory: CVE-2025-6023
• Grafana Security Release Blog
• Grafana Upgrade Documentation
• Grafana GitHub Releases
• NewReleases.io: Grafana v11.6.3+security-01

Source: This report was created using AI

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