SurrealDB before 2.5.0 and before 3.0.0-beta.3 contains a confused deputy privilege escalation vulnerability. Unprivileged users (e.g., those with the database editor role) can create or modify fields containing futures, functions, or closures. Because these are executed in the context of the invoking/querying user rather than their creator, an attacker can plant malicious logic that executes with a higher-privileged user's permissions when that user reads or writes the affected record. This can lead to full privilege escalation, including creation of a root owner and server takeover.

SurrealDB before v2.6.1 (and before v3.0.0-beta.3) contains a denial of service vulnerability in its embedded JavaScript scripting engine, which is enabled via the --allow-scripting capability (disabled by default). Any user able to execute arbitrary queries — including unauthenticated guests when --allow-guests is enabled — can use built-in string functions to construct a large string and pass it to the JavaScript runtime for compilation, triggering a null pointer dereference in the underlying QuickJS-NG engine. This causes the server process to terminate immediately without graceful shutdown, requiring a manual restart. The issue was fixed by updating the rquickjs dependency from v0.9.0 to v0.11.0.

SurrealDB before 3.1.5 fail to apply field-level SELECT permissions to ORDER BY clauses, allowing authenticated users to leak the relative ordering of restricted field values. Attackers can issue ORDER BY queries on indexed restricted fields to recover the hidden values' sort order across records, even though the field itself returns null as intended.

SurrealDB before 2.0.5, 2.1.x before 2.1.5, and 2.2.x before 2.2.2 fails to properly escape table and field names in the command-line export command. An authenticated System User with OWNER or EDITOR roles can create tables or fields with malicious names containing SurrealQL. When a higher-privileged user subsequently imports the exported backup, the injected SurrealQL executes, enabling privilege escalation and root-level takeover of the SurrealDB instance. Applications that let users define custom tables or fields are also exposed to a universal second-order SurrealQL injection even when query parameters are sanitized.

SurrealDB versions before 2.2.2 contain a memory exhaustion vulnerability in the string::replace function that fails to restrict resulting string length when using regex patterns. An authenticated attacker can craft a malicious query to exhaust server memory through unbounded string allocations, causing denial of service.

SurrealDB versions before 2.0.4 contain an uncaught exception handling vulnerability in the parser error rendering code when processing empty strings. Authorized clients can execute malformed queries with empty string conversions to record, duration, or datetime types that cause a panic in error rendering, crashing the server.

SurrealDB versions before 1.1.1 fail to properly validate invocation of custom parameters and functions at root or namespace levels, causing server panic. Authorized clients can invoke these entities at unsupported levels to crash the SurrealDB server, resulting in denial of service.

SurrealDB versions before 2.0.4 fail to properly enforce field permissions during SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations, allowing authorized users to access unauthorized field values through various query techniques. Attackers can exploit SELECT VALUE operations, field aliasing, function arguments, WHERE clause filtering, RETURN BEFORE clauses, and SET clause references to leak protected field contents despite lacking SELECT permissions.

SurrealDB versions before 2.2.2 contain a local file read vulnerability in the DEFINE ANALYZER statement that allows authenticated users to read arbitrary files on the file system. Attackers with root, namespace, or database level privileges can point analyzers to arbitrary file paths and exfiltrate content from two-column tab-separated files.

SurrealDB versions before 1.1.0 fail to enforce recursion depth limits when parsing nested SurrealQL statements including IF, RELATE, and attribute access idioms. Authorized attackers can submit queries with excessive nesting depth to cause stack overflow and crash the server.