Open WebUI: Unauthenticated requests can stall the server via uncached OIDC fetches in back-channel logout

Summary

The OIDC back-channel logout endpoint is unauthenticated by design, because the identity provider calls it without a browser session. Before checking whether the submitted logout token was genuine, the handler fetched the provider's discovery document and its signing keys over the network, and repeated both fetches on every request because nothing was cached. The signing-key fetch also ran as a blocking call inside the async event loop. A small number of requests carrying a worthless token was therefore enough to make the whole instance stop answering.

Preconditions

• ENABLE_OAUTH_BACKCHANNEL_LOGOUT=true. The default is False, so a stock deployment is not affected. This setting is recommended in the Open WebUI hardening documentation, which is why the issue is treated as in scope.
• At least one OIDC provider configured (OAUTH_CLIENT_ID, OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET, OPENID_PROVIDER_URL).
• No account, credential, session or secret identifier is required. The attacker needs network access to the instance and the configured issuer string, which is published in the provider's own discovery document.

Impact

Against 0.11.0, with the identity provider answering in 150 ms, 60 concurrent requests carrying a token whose signature was four characters long stalled the async event loop for 8.3 seconds, measured against an idle baseline of 10.8 ms. For the length of that stall the process answers nothing: no chat requests, no API calls, no health check. Open WebUI runs a single worker by default, so the effect is instance-wide rather than per-connection, and no rate limit sits in front of the endpoint.

The same traffic is also amplified outward: 20 sequential requests produced 20 discovery fetches and 40 key-set fetches at the identity provider, so an attacker can drive load onto the provider through the instance.

No data is read, modified or exposed, and the forged token is still rejected. The cost is paid before the rejection.