CVE-2025-0639 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 04/24/2025
An issue has been discovered affecting service availability via issue preview in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 16.7 before 17.9.7, 17.10 before 17.10.5, and 17.11 before 17.11.1.
If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.
Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 08/08/2025
This vulnerability resides within GitLab's service availability framework, specifically impacting the issue preview functionality across multiple version ranges including 16.7 through 17.9.6, 17.10 through 17.10.4, and 17.11 through 17.11.0. The flaw manifests as a denial of service condition that can be triggered through crafted inputs to the issue preview mechanism, potentially disrupting normal operational workflows for development teams relying on GitLab's issue tracking capabilities. This vulnerability represents a critical concern for organizations that depend heavily on GitLab's collaborative features and continuous integration pipelines, as it directly impacts system availability and can cascade into broader operational disruptions.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability involves improper input validation and resource handling within the issue preview processing module. When users submit certain types of data through the issue preview functionality, the system fails to properly sanitize or limit resource consumption during the preview generation process. This can lead to excessive memory allocation, CPU consumption, or other resource exhaustion conditions that prevent the service from properly handling legitimate requests. The vulnerability aligns with CWE-400, which categorizes issues related to resource exhaustion, and represents a classic example of how insufficient input validation can create conditions for denial of service attacks. The flaw operates at the application layer and can be exploited through web-based interfaces without requiring special privileges or authentication.
From an operational impact perspective, this vulnerability can severely disrupt development workflows and team productivity by making GitLab services unavailable during critical periods. Teams relying on issue tracking, code review processes, and collaborative development features may experience complete service outages or significant performance degradation. The impact extends beyond simple unavailability as it can affect the entire CI/CD pipeline, preventing code merges, deployments, and other automated processes that depend on GitLab's issue management capabilities. Organizations may face increased incident response times, potential data loss risks, and degraded service quality metrics. This vulnerability also creates opportunities for attackers to exploit the service disruption for more sophisticated attacks or to gain unauthorized access to sensitive development environments.
Organizations should implement immediate mitigations including upgrading to the patched versions 17.9.7, 17.10.5, or 17.11.1 respectively, depending on their current GitLab version. Network-level protections such as rate limiting and input validation should be implemented at the perimeter to prevent exploitation attempts. The ATT&CK framework categorizes this type of vulnerability under T1499 which covers network denial of service attacks, and organizations should consider implementing monitoring and alerting for unusual resource consumption patterns. Additionally, implementing proper input sanitization controls and resource limits within the GitLab configuration can provide additional defense in depth. Regular security assessments and vulnerability scanning should be conducted to identify similar issues in other GitLab components or related systems, as this vulnerability demonstrates the importance of maintaining up-to-date security patches and robust input validation mechanisms across all development infrastructure components.