n8ive by Design – One Leaked Key. Multiple n8n Attack Chains

n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform with AI agent support, used by organizations worldwide to connect internal tools, automate pipelines, and orchestrate API integrations. With 31,793 publicly accessible instances on Shodan, 48 security advisories since January 2026, and CVEs listed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, it has become a high-value target for attackers. We started with real-world n8n JWT tokens exposed on GitHub: 4,576 unique API keys across 5,469 commits. Of the 896 publicly reachable instances we tested, 321 authenticated successfully (around 25% of them). Most had workflows containing hard-coded credentials for Notion, Jira, Zendesk, SQL databases, GitHub, and OpenAI. One backed itself up to a public GitHub repo using an SSH key stored in the n9n workflow itself. From there we built three attack chains: RCE via workflow abuse and existing CVEs, credential exfiltration from live production instances, and original cryptographic weaknesses in n8n's secret-handling that we call n8ive crypto. The cryptographic flaws include session forgery for OIDC-provisioned and pending users. To conclude, we provide hardening guidance on what teams should do now to contain the blast radius of a leaked key and which configuration they should use to improve n8n security.