Advisoriesby IbisOpen WebUI's responses passthrough endpoint lacks access control authorization
Summary
The /responses endpoint in the OpenAI router accepts any authenticated user and forwards requests directly to upstream LLM providers without enforcing per-model access control. While the primary chat completion endpoint (generate_chat_completion) checks model ownership, group membership, and AccessGrants before allowing a request, the /responses proxy only validates that the user has a valid session via get_verified_user.
This allows any authenticated user , regardless of role or group assignment , to interact with any model configured on the instance by sending a POST request to /api/openai/responses with an arbitrary model ID.
Impact
As per OWASP TOP 10 LLM:
- Model Denial of Service (OWASP LLM04): An unauthorized user can submit resource-intensive requests to expensive models (e.g., o1-pro, GPT-4o) that were explicitly restricted by the administrator. In shared deployments, this can exhaust API budgets or rate limits, causing total service disruption for all legitimate users.
- Model Theft (OWASP LLM10): If the instance proxies access to fine-tuned or self-hosted models, unauthorized users can freely interact with them, enabling capability extraction or model distillation without authorization.
- Access Policy Bypass: Administrators lose the ability to enforce cost-tier restrictions, team-based model assignments, or compliance boundaries...
Affected versions
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| open-webui PyPI | < 0.9.0 | 0.9.0 |
Details and references
## Summary The /responses endpoint in the OpenAI router accepts any authenticated user and forwards requests directly to upstream LLM providers without enforcing per-model access control. While the primary chat completion endpoint (generate_chat_completion) checks model ownership, group membership, and AccessGrants before allowing a request, the /responses proxy only validates that the user has a valid session via get_verified_user. This allows any authenticated user , regardless of role or group assignment , to interact with any model configured on the instance by sending a POST request to /api/openai/responses with an arbitrary model ID. ## Impact As per OWASP TOP 10 LLM: - **Model Denial of Service (OWASP LLM04):** An unauthorized user can submit resource-intensive requests to expensive models (e.g., o1-pro, GPT-4o) that were explicitly restricted by the administrator. In shared deployments, this can exhaust API budgets or rate limits, causing total service disruption for all legitimate users. - **Model Theft (OWASP LLM10):** If the instance proxies access to fine-tuned or self-hosted models, unauthorized users can freely interact with them, enabling capability extraction or model distillation without authorization. - **Access Policy Bypass:** Administrators lose the ability to enforce cost-tier restrictions, team-based model assignments, or compliance boundaries through the existing access control system. The endpoint is a raw passthrough proxy and does not resolve workspace model configurations (system prompts, knowledge bases, RAG pipelines). Therefore, workspace-specific confidential data is not directly exposed through this vector. PR: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/23481
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