Critical Token Guard Auth Bypass Fixed in Laravel 13.29 and 12.68
An urgent security fix addresses an authentication bypass vulnerability affecting legacy TokenGuard configurations when handling malformed bearer headers.
Critical Token Guard Auth Bypass Fixed in Laravel 13.29 and 12.68
The Laravel security team has published patch releases for both the Laravel 12.x and 13.x branches. This release mitigates a security bypass scenario within the legacy TokenGuard authentication driver.
Vulnerability Details
Applications relying on the default token driver with database-backed API keys could under specific PHP string comparison quirks authenticate an incoming request when receiving empty or specifically structured bearer tokens.
// Composer command to apply the security update
composer update laravel/framework:^13.29.0
Sanctum and Passport Users
Applications utilizing Laravel Sanctum or Laravel Passport are not affected by this vulnerability, as they implement independent, cryptographically secure hash verification mechanisms. However, upgrading to the latest framework patch is recommended for all projects.