CVE-2026-70483: Open WebUI: broken authz cancels other users' chats

## Summary `DELETE /api/v1/chats/{id}` cancelled a chat's in-flight tasks before it checked whether the caller was allowed to delete that chat. Any authenticated user who knew another user's chat id could therefore abort that user's running model response, title generation or tag generation. The deletion itself was still refused, so the only missing control was on the cancellation side effect. ## Preconditions Default configuration, no special deployment shape. The attacker needs a normal account with the default `user` role and nothing else: the `chat.delete` permission is not required, and revoking it does not prevent the cancellation. The attacker also needs the victim's chat id, which is returned by the read-only shared-chat endpoint when a chat or a folder has been shared with them - otherwise enumerating the chat id requires guessing the chat id or brute forcing it, and the victim must have a generation running at that moment. ## Impact A user can repeatedly interrupt another user's generations without any write access to the target chat. Nothing is deleted, modified or disclosed, and the victim can simply regenerate, so the effect is limited to availability of in-flight responses. Because the attacker only needs a chat id, the interruption can be scripted and repeated for as long as the id stays valid. ## Fix Fixed in https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/27006, released in 0.11.0. The handler now resolves and authorizes the chat first and only cancels tasks and deletes once the caller is an admin or a permitted owner; an unauthorized caller gets 401 or 404 with no cancellation. ## Root cause Affected component: `delete_chat_by_id` in `backend/open_webui/routers/chats.py`, serving `DELETE /api/v1/chats/{id}`. Affected setup: every build from 0.9.6 up to and including 0.10.2. The cancellation was written as a cleanup step for the delete that follows it, and it was placed at the top of the handler so that it would run before the chat row disappeared. That put an unauthenticated-by-ownership side effect ahead of every check in the function: the admin branch, the `chat.delete` permission check, and the owner lookup all ran afterwards, so their outcome could no longer affect whether the tasks were stopped. The dedicated task-stop endpoint already verified ownership before calling the same helper, so the intended ordering existed elsewhere in the codebase. ## Proof of concept Against a 0.10.2 instance with two accounts, a victim admin and an attacker holding the default `user` role, and an upstream that streams slowly: 1. As the victim, start a generation in a chat and confirm `GET /api/tasks/chat/{chat_id}` reports one active task. 2. As the attacker, confirm `GET /api/v1/chats/{chat_id}` returns 401, then send `DELETE /api/v1/chats/{chat_id}`. 3. The delete is refused with 404, the chat still exists, but the victim's task list is now empty and the assistant message is marked done mid-generation. A control run without step 2 keeps generating. Repeating step 2 with the `chat.delete` permission revoked for the `user` role returns 401 and still cancels the task. The same sequence against 0.11.0 leaves the task running. ## Credits @GabrielGomesAL, who reported the missing authorization on the chat delete endpoint.

An attacker with a standard 'user' account on a shared Open WebUI instance obtains a victim's chat id — for example via a chat or folder the victim shared with them, or by brute-forcing ids. While the victim has a generation actively streaming (a long model response, or an auto-generated title/tag task), the attacker sends DELETE /api/v1/chats/{chat_id}. The deletion itself is refused with a 404 since the attacker isn't authorized to delete the chat, but the handler had already canceled the victim's in-flight task as a side effect before that authorization check ran. The victim's response is truncated mid-generation with no error explaining why. The attacker can script this against any known chat id, repeatedly interrupting the same victim's work as long as the id remains valid and sharing isn't revoked.