CVE-2019-10108 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE
An Incorrect Access Control (issue 1 of 2) was discovered in GitLab Community and Enterprise Edition before 11.7.8, 11.8.x before 11.8.4, and 11.9.x before 11.9.2. It allowed non-members of a private project/group to add and read labels.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/21/2023
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2019-10108 represents a critical access control flaw within GitLab's permission management system that affected multiple versions of both Community and Enterprise editions. This issue stems from inadequate validation of user permissions when accessing project and group label functionality, creating a significant security gap that could be exploited by unauthorized individuals. The flaw specifically impacted versions prior to 11.7.8, 11.8.4, and 11.9.2 respectively, indicating a widespread vulnerability across the GitLab product line that required immediate attention from organizations relying on these platforms for source code management and collaboration.
The technical nature of this vulnerability falls under the CWE-284 access control weakness category, where insufficient authorization checks allow unauthorized users to perform operations they should not be permitted to execute. In this case, the flaw manifested as a failure in the GitLab system to properly verify whether users possessed adequate permissions to interact with labels within private projects and groups. The vulnerability allowed non-members to both add new labels and read existing labels, effectively bypassing the intended access restrictions that should have prevented unauthorized individuals from accessing sensitive project metadata. This misconfiguration enabled attackers to gain visibility into project organizational structures and potentially extract information about project activities, timelines, and development priorities that would normally be restricted to authorized team members.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple information disclosure, as it fundamentally undermines the security model that GitLab relies upon for protecting private repositories. When non-members can add labels, they can manipulate project organization and potentially create misleading information that could confuse legitimate team members or be used for social engineering purposes. The ability to read labels provides attackers with insights into project structure, development phases, and potentially sensitive information about project scope and priorities. This vulnerability aligns with ATT&CK technique T1078 legitimate credentials, as unauthorized users could leverage this flaw to gain unauthorized access to project information that would normally require proper authentication and authorization. Organizations using GitLab for sensitive development work, particularly those with proprietary code or security-critical projects, faced significant risks from this flaw, as it could enable attackers to gather intelligence that might be used in subsequent attacks or to identify potential targets within their development ecosystem.
The remediation for this vulnerability required immediate patching of affected GitLab installations to versions 11.7.8, 11.8.4, and 11.9.2 respectively, ensuring that proper access controls were enforced for label operations. Organizations should have implemented comprehensive security audits of their GitLab environments to identify any potential exploitation that might have occurred during the vulnerability window. The fix addressed the core issue by strengthening authorization checks for label-related operations, ensuring that only authenticated members of private projects and groups could perform label management tasks. Security teams should have monitored their GitLab instances for unusual label creation or modification patterns that might have indicated exploitation attempts, and implemented additional monitoring for access patterns that deviated from normal user behavior. This vulnerability serves as a reminder of the critical importance of proper access control implementation in collaborative development platforms and the potential consequences of insufficient authorization checks in systems handling sensitive code repositories and development information.