GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Go
GHSA-hwr4-mq23-wcv5 mercure has Topic Selector Cache Key Collision
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-39972
- Ecosystem
- Go
- Packages
- github.com/dunglas/mercure
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- Weaknesses
- CWE-1289
- Reviewed
- 2026-04-08
Affected packages
• Go github.com/dunglas/mercure: < 0.22.0 → fixed in 0.22.0
Description
Impact
A cache key collision vulnerability in `TopicSelectorStore` allows an attacker to poison the match result cache, potentially causing private updates to be delivered to unauthorized subscribers or blocking delivery to authorized ones.
The cache key was constructed by concatenating the topic selector and topic with an underscore separator:
```go
k = "m_" + topicSelector + "_" + topic
```
Because both topic selectors and topics can contain underscores, two distinct pairs can produce the same key:
```
selector="foo_bar" topic="baz" → key: "m_foo_bar_baz"
selector="foo" topic="bar_baz" → key: "m_foo_bar_baz"
```
An attacker who can subscribe to the hub or publish updates with crafted topic names can exploit this to bypass authorization checks on private updates.
Patches
The vulnerability is fixed by replacing string-encoded cache keys with typed Go struct keys that are inherently collision-free:
```go
type matchCacheKey struct {
topicSelector string
topic string
}
```
The internal `TopicSelectorStoreCache` interface and sharded cache abstraction have also been removed in favor of a single typed otter cache.
Users should upgrade to version 0.22.0 or later.
Workarounds
Disable the topic selector cache by setting `topic_selector_cache` to `-1` in the Caddyfile, or by passing a cache size of `0` when using the library directly. This eliminates the vulnerability at the cost of reduced performance.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-39972 Mercure is a protocol for pushing data updates to web browsers and other HTTP clients in a battery-efficient way. vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-1289 Improper Validation of Unsafe Equivalence in Input weakness
References
- https://github.com/dunglas/mercure/security/advisories/GHSA-hwr4-mq23-wcv5 web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-39972 advisory
- https://github.com/dunglas/mercure/commit/4964a69be904fd61e35b5f1e691271663b6fdd64 web
- https://github.com/dunglas/mercure package
- https://github.com/dunglas/mercure/releases/tag/v0.22.0 web