CVE-2024-1963 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 06/13/2024
An issue has been discovered in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions starting from 8.4 prior to 16.10.7, starting from 16.11 prior to 16.11.4, and starting from 17.0 prior to 17.0.2. A vulnerability in GitLab's Asana integration allowed an attacker to potentially cause a regular expression denial of service by sending specially crafted requests.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 07/19/2024
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2024-1963 represents a significant security flaw within GitLab's Asana integration functionality that affects multiple versions of the GitLab Community and Enterprise editions. This issue stems from inadequate input validation and improper handling of user-supplied data within the integration's regular expression processing mechanisms. The vulnerability exists in versions starting from 8.4 through 16.10.6, 16.11 through 16.11.3, and 17.0 through 17.0.1, creating a substantial attack surface across numerous deployments. The flaw specifically manifests when the Asana integration processes incoming requests containing maliciously crafted data that triggers problematic regular expression patterns.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability involves the exploitation of regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) conditions within GitLab's integration layer. When the system receives specially crafted requests through the Asana integration interface, it processes these inputs through regular expression patterns that are susceptible to catastrophic backtracking. This occurs because the regular expressions used in the integration contain inefficient patterns that can be manipulated to cause exponential execution time growth, effectively consuming system resources and potentially leading to complete service unavailability. The vulnerability falls under the CWE-400 category of Uncontrolled Resource Consumption and specifically aligns with the ReDoS attack pattern documented in the ATT&CK framework under T1499.1 for Resource Hijacking.
The operational impact of CVE-2024-1963 extends beyond simple service disruption, as it can be leveraged by attackers to perform resource exhaustion attacks that may affect system availability and performance. An attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability to cause denial of service conditions that impact legitimate users of the GitLab instance, particularly in environments where the Asana integration is actively used. The attack requires minimal privileges and can be executed through the standard GitLab user interface or API endpoints that handle Asana integration requests. This makes the vulnerability particularly dangerous as it can be exploited by users with basic access permissions, potentially leading to cascading effects on development workflows and continuous integration processes that depend on GitLab's integration capabilities.
Mitigation strategies for CVE-2024-1963 primarily focus on upgrading to patched versions of GitLab where the vulnerability has been addressed through improved input validation and regular expression optimization. Organizations should immediately upgrade to GitLab versions 16.10.7, 16.11.4, or 17.0.2 respectively, depending on their current deployment. Additionally, administrators should implement network-level protections such as rate limiting and input validation at the perimeter to reduce the impact of potential exploitation attempts. The fix typically involves sanitizing user inputs before processing them through regular expression patterns and replacing vulnerable regex constructs with more efficient alternatives. Security teams should also monitor system resources and implement automated alerting for unusual CPU or memory consumption patterns that could indicate exploitation attempts. The vulnerability demonstrates the importance of proper input validation and the potential for seemingly innocuous integration features to become attack vectors when not properly secured against malicious input manipulation.