Medium · published October 23, 2025
Oxford Nanopore Technologies' MinKNOW software at or prior to version 24.11 creates a temporary file to store the local authentication token during startup, before copying it to its final location. This temporary file is created in a directory accessible to all users on the system. An unauthorized local user or process can exploit this behavior by placing a file lock on the temporary token file using the flock system call. This prevents MinKNOW from completing the token generation process. As a result, no valid local token is created, and the software is unable to execute commands on the sequencer. This leads to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, blocking sequencing operations.