CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedThe appointment booking software from OpenReception is vulnerable due to an ineffective proof-of-work mechanism at the bootstrap challenge endpoint, which allows attackers to bypass rate limiting and abuse the booking flow. With a low difficulty level of 16 bits, modern hardware can easily solve the challenges, enabling rapid automated submissions. Organizations using versions prior to 1.0.6 should prioritize updating their software to mitigate the risk of appointment booking abuse.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD Description
OpenReception's appointment booking software provides an end-to-end encrypted appointment booking platform. Prior to version 1.0.6, the bootstrap challenge endpoint at `/api/tenants/{id}/appointments/bootstrap-challenge` issues a SHA-256 proof-of-work with `difficulty=4` hex zeros, equivalent to 16 bits of work. Modern hardware solves this in under 200 milliseconds, providing essentially no friction against automated abuse of the patient booking flow. Proof-of-work is used in the booking flow as a rate-limiter for unauthenticated clients establishing tunnels and submitting appointments. At 16 bits of difficulty, the construct is decorative rather than effective. An attacker can solve PoW challenges as fast as the server can issue them, defeating the rate-limiting purpose. The handler also calls `challengeThrottleService.checkThrottle(binding, "passkey")`, but the binding includes attacker-controlled values (`tunnelId`, `clientPublicKey`, and optional `emailHash`). For each fresh attempt, the attacker can supply new values, producing a new throttle key and bypassing the per-binding accumulation. Practical abuse friction is therefore the PoW difficulty itself, not a stable per-IP or per-email server-side throttle. Version 1.0.6 fixes the issue.