Docker Hub flaw let account conversions hand a token to another user, open for two years

Victoria Shinder13 October 2026, 06:542 min read

Docker has published an advisory for CVE-2026-105445, a flaw in Docker Hub's identity and access management that it rated critical as a software supply-chain risk. It was reported on 30 September 2026 through Docker's vulnerability disclosure programme by Peter Molnar and Krisztian Hozak of mptrdev.com; Docker says the fix was in production that afternoon, less than four hours after the report.

The mechanism. Docker Hub lets a personal account be converted into an organization — the usual way to move a repository such as alice/app under organizational ownership without breaking existing pulls. During conversion the user names an existing account as the new organization's owner. From 26 August 2024, conversion also re-assigned the converted account's personal access tokens (PATs) to that owner by changing the token's owner record, without rotating or revoking the secret, and without asking or notifying the named owner.

What an attacker could do. Create an account, generate a PAT, convert the account to an organization naming a target as owner — and keep a still-valid token that now authenticated to the registry as the target. Within the token's scope that meant pulling, pushing or deleting images in the target's repositories and in organizations the target could access, including publishing images under a legitimate name. It did not give access to the web interface and could not change passwords, email or two-factor settings.

Exposure window and findings. The window ran from 26 August 2024 until the fix on 30 September 2026. Docker says it reviewed every conversion since then against registry authentication logs and token records, examined about 304,000 pushes made with transferred tokens, and found no evidence of exploitation: every such push landed in the converted organization's or the new owner's own repositories. Docker is explicit about the limit of that finding: logs show when a token is used, not that it exists, so it treated every transferred PAT as potentially affected.

What was done. Affected users and organization owners were emailed on 2 October; transferred PATs were force-deactivated on 8 October, except where holders opted out. Conversion no longer transfers PATs, and Docker says it will require consent before someone is named an organization owner, keep an auditable history of token ownership changes and review other credential-ownership flows.

What users should do. Docker says that users who did not receive the 2 October email were not exposed. Everyone else should review the PATs under Account settings and revoke unknown or unused ones; automation that belongs to an organization should use organization access tokens rather than a person's PAT.

Source: Docker, "Docker Hub security advisory: personal access tokens transferred during account-to-organization conversions" — https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-hub-security-advisory-cve-2026-105445