Ignition — Low-Privilege Project Creation Leads to Gateway-Side Script Execution

North Echo reported an authenticated privilege-escalation issue in Inductive Automation Ignition 8.1.53 to the Inductive Automation security team. A roleless authenticated Vision client user could create a new project containing attacker-controlled resources and obtain code execution on the gateway when that project loaded. Inductive Automation confirmed the lead finding, fixed it in Ignition 8.1.54 (released May 20, 2026), and credited North Echo in its Trust Center advisory.

Background: projects and gateway scripting

Ignition is a widely deployed SCADA / HMI platform. A gateway hosts projects, and projects can carry gateway-scoped event scripts — including startup scripts that run server-side, in the gateway’s own context, when a project starts. Authoring projects and their scripts is meant to be a Designer-level activity: it is, by design, a code-execution surface, so it should sit behind a privileged role.

The Vision client, by contrast, is the runtime an ordinary operator logs into. A Vision client user is not supposed to be able to author gateway-executing code.

The finding

That boundary did not hold. The project-management RPC path that creates projects defaulted to unrestricted rather than requiring the Designer role. As a result, a normal authenticated Vision client user with no special roles could:

1. Authenticate as a low-privilege user.
2. Call the project-creation RPC to create a new project.
3. Include an ignition/event-scripts startup script in that project.
4. Wait for the gateway to load the project (on restart or project start), at which point the seeded script executed on the gateway.

The seeded startup script was ordinary Jython running in the gateway context:

f = open('/tmp/lp3_startup_hit', 'w')
f.write('hit')
f.close()

After the gateway loaded the malicious project, the marker file existed inside the container, and the gateway log recorded the project starting:

-rw-r--r--. 1 ignition ignition 3 /tmp/lp3_startup_hit
Starting project: BleachExec
Project started. project-name=BleachExec

The low-privilege Projects.create call returned errorNo=0, and the malicious project — manifest plus the encoded event-script resource — was written to disk under data/projects/. Validated end-to-end against a fresh Ignition 8.1.53 gateway on April 4, 2026.

Why it matters

This is an authenticated remote-code-execution-class outcome reached from an unprivileged account. A user provisioned only for Vision client access could pivot to running arbitrary server-side scripting in the gateway’s context — a far more severe result than an information leak or an isolated authorization bypass. On an operational-technology asset, code execution on the gateway is about as high as impact goes.

The root cause is a classic incorrect-default-permission problem (CWE-276): a code-execution-capable operation whose default posture was permissive, so the privileged-role gate that should have protected it was never consulted.

The fix

Inductive Automation confirmed the finding, framing the root cause as a project-creation permission that defaulted to unrestricted when it should require the Designer role. The corrected behavior shipped in:

• Ignition 8.1.54 (released May 20, 2026) — project creation is now restricted to Designer sessions, and the permissive default is no longer consulted.
• The 8.3 series was not affected.

Operators on 8.1.x should update to 8.1.54 or later.

Disclosure timeline

A note on the second observation

The same campaign also surfaced a ModuleInvoke RPC path where deserialization of client-supplied arguments occurred before method-level authorization on a protected method. The reachability and the ordering were demonstrable, but no working gadget chain was produced through that path. The vendor assessed it as covered by the 2023 deserialization remediations (CVE-2023-50218 through CVE-2023-50221), with further hardening in 8.3, and it is treated as closed absent a concrete exploit. It is noted here for completeness rather than as a live issue.

Coordination & credit

This was reported and fixed under coordinated disclosure with the Inductive Automation security team, who handled it professionally throughout. The fix is public in Ignition 8.1.54. The issue is tracked as CVE-2026-77393 (CVSS v3.1 8.8 / v4.0 8.7), published in CISA ICS advisory ICSA-26-246-06, and the Inductive Automation Trust Center advisory credits North Echo as the reporter.

North Echo Security Research performs independent, logic-level vulnerability research on ICS/OT and edge platforms. — northecho.dev