Open WebUI: Any authenticated user can cancel another user's chat generation via the chat delete endpoint

Summary

DELETE /api/v1/chats/{id} cancelled a chat's in-flight tasks before it checked whether the caller was allowed to delete that chat. Any authenticated user who knew another user's chat id could therefore abort that user's running model response, title generation or tag generation. The deletion itself was still refused, so the only missing control was on the cancellation side effect.

Preconditions

Default configuration, no special deployment shape. The attacker needs a normal account with the default user role and nothing else: the chat.delete permission is not required, and revoking it does not prevent the cancellation. The attacker also needs the victim's chat id, which is returned by the read-only shared-chat endpoint when a chat or a folder has been shared with them - otherwise enumerating the chat id requires guessing the chat id or brute forcing it, and the victim must have a generation running at that moment.

Impact

A user can repeatedly interrupt another user's generations without any write access to the target chat. Nothing is deleted, modified or disclosed, and the victim can simply regenerate, so the effect is limited to availability of in-flight responses. Because the attacker only needs a chat id, the interruption can be scripted and repeated for as long as the id stays valid.

Fix

Fixed in https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/pull/27006, released in 0.11.0. The handler now resolves and authorizes the chat first and only cancels tasks and deletes once the caller is an admin or a permitted owner; an unauthorized caller gets 401 or 404 with no cancellation.

Root cause

Affected component: delete_chat_by_id in backend/open_webui/routers/chats.py, serving DELETE /api/v1/chats/{id}. Affected setup: every build from 0.9.6 up to and including 0.10.2.

The cancellation was written as a cleanup step for the delete that follows it, and it was placed at the top of the handler so that it would run before the chat row disappeared. That put an unauthenticated-by-ownership side effect ahead of every check in the function: the admin branch, the chat.delete permission check, and the owner lookup all ran afterwards, so their outcome could no longer affect whether the tasks were stopped. The dedicated task-stop endpoint already verified ownership before calling the same helper, so the intended ordering existed elsewhere in the codebase.

Proof of concept

Against a 0.10.2 instance with two accounts, a victim admin and an attacker holding the default user role, and an upstream that streams slowly:

1. As the victim, start a generation in a chat and confirm GET /api/tasks/chat/{chat_id} reports one active task.
2. As the attacker, confirm GET /api/v1/chats/{chat_id} returns 401, then send DELETE /api/v1/chats/{chat_id}.
3. The delete is refused with 404, the chat still exists, but the victim's task list is now empty and the assistant message is marked done mid-generation. A control run without step 2 keeps generating.

Repeating step 2 with the chat.delete permission revoked for the user role returns 401 and still cancels the task. The same sequence against 0.11.0 leaves the task running.

Credits

@GabrielGomesAL, who reported the missing authorization on the chat delete endpoint.