CVE-2022-1174 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 04/05/2022
A potential DoS vulnerability was discovered in Gitlab CE/EE versions 13.7 before 14.7.7, all versions starting from 14.8 before 14.8.5, all versions starting from 14.9 before 14.9.2 allowed an attacker to trigger high CPU usage via a special crafted input added in Issues, Merge requests, Milestones, Snippets, Wiki pages, etc.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 04/06/2022
This vulnerability represents a denial of service condition that affects Gitlab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition installations across multiple version ranges. The flaw manifests when attackers submit specially crafted input data through various Gitlab components including issues, merge requests, milestones, snippets, and wiki pages. The vulnerability stems from insufficient input validation and processing logic that fails to properly handle malformed or maliciously constructed data. When such input is processed, the Gitlab application experiences excessive cpu consumption, potentially leading to system resource exhaustion and service unavailability for legitimate users.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability leverages the application's parsing and rendering mechanisms for user-generated content. Attackers can exploit this weakness by creating or modifying issues, merge requests, or other content types with carefully constructed payloads that cause the underlying git operations or markdown processing to consume disproportionate computational resources. This type of vulnerability aligns with CWE-400 which categorizes "Uncontrolled Resource Consumption" as a fundamental weakness in software systems. The issue demonstrates how seemingly benign user input can be manipulated to cause significant performance degradation through inefficient algorithmic processing or infinite loops in the application's core logic.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple service disruption to potentially compromise the entire Gitlab instance availability. Organizations relying on Gitlab for version control, collaboration, and development workflows face risks of extended downtime during attacks, which can severely impact development cycles and team productivity. The vulnerability affects multiple components within Gitlab's ecosystem, making it particularly dangerous as attackers can exploit various entry points to trigger the same resource exhaustion behavior. This multi-vector attack surface increases the likelihood of successful exploitation and makes defensive measures more complex to implement effectively.
Mitigation strategies should focus on implementing input sanitization and validation at multiple layers of the application architecture. Organizations should immediately upgrade to patched versions of Gitlab where available, specifically versions 14.7.7, 14.8.5, and 14.9.2 or later. Network-level protections including rate limiting and input filtering mechanisms can provide additional defense-in-depth measures. The vulnerability also highlights the importance of implementing proper resource monitoring and alerting systems to detect unusual cpu usage patterns that may indicate exploitation attempts. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to T1499.004 which covers "Network Denial of Service" and demonstrates how application-level flaws can be leveraged to achieve system-level disruption. Regular security assessments and input validation testing should be implemented to prevent similar vulnerabilities from emerging in future releases, ensuring that user-generated content processing maintains appropriate resource boundaries and computational efficiency.