CVE-2025-0993 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 05/22/2025
An issue has been discovered in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions before 17.10.7, 17.11 before 17.11.3, and 18.0 before 18.0.1. This could allow an authenticated attacker to cause a denial of service condition by exhausting server resources.
Statistical analysis made it clear that VulDB provides the best quality for vulnerability data.
Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 05/23/2025
This vulnerability in GitLab CE/EE represents a significant denial of service risk that affects multiple version branches including 17.10.x before 17.10.7, 17.11.x before 17.11.3, and 18.0.x before 18.0.1. The flaw specifically targets server resource exhaustion mechanisms, allowing authenticated attackers with legitimate access credentials to exploit the system through resource consumption attacks. This represents a critical security concern as it enables malicious actors who have already gained authentication access to disrupt normal service operations and potentially cause system-wide outages. The vulnerability falls under the category of resource exhaustion attacks that can be classified as CWE-400, which specifically addresses unchecked resource consumption in software systems. The attack vector involves authenticated users leveraging legitimate privileges to perform operations that consume excessive system resources such as memory, CPU cycles, or file descriptors, ultimately leading to service disruption.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability appears to stem from inadequate resource management within GitLab's processing pipelines, particularly in how the system handles authenticated user requests. Attackers can exploit this weakness by crafting specific requests that trigger resource-intensive operations or by repeatedly initiating resource-consuming processes. The vulnerability manifests when the system fails to properly validate or limit resource usage patterns from authenticated sessions, allowing attackers to consume available resources at an unsustainable rate. This type of attack aligns with ATT&CK technique T1499.004 which covers network denial of service attacks, and specifically targets the resource exhaustion category of attacks. The flaw demonstrates poor input validation and resource limiting mechanisms that should be implemented to prevent authenticated users from causing system instability through excessive resource consumption.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple service disruption to potentially compromise the entire GitLab instance availability and integrity. Organizations relying on GitLab for version control, CI/CD pipelines, and collaborative development may experience complete service unavailability, leading to productivity losses and potential data access issues. The vulnerability's scope affects both community and enterprise editions, making it particularly concerning for organizations with extensive GitLab deployments. When exploited, the denial of service condition can result in system crashes, unresponsiveness, or degraded performance that impacts all users of the platform. The resource exhaustion can also trigger cascading failures in dependent systems, as GitLab often serves as a critical component in development workflows and automated processes. This vulnerability represents a serious threat to operational continuity and can be exploited to create sustained service disruptions that may require system restarts or manual intervention to resolve.
Organizations should immediately implement mitigations including updating to the patched versions mentioned in the advisory, specifically 17.10.7, 17.11.3, and 18.0.1. Additional protective measures include implementing rate limiting for authenticated user sessions, monitoring resource consumption patterns, and establishing automated alerts for unusual resource usage. System administrators should consider implementing resource quotas and access controls to limit the impact of potentially malicious authenticated users. The vulnerability highlights the importance of proper resource management and input validation in enterprise software systems. Organizations should also review their incident response procedures to ensure rapid detection and mitigation of similar resource exhaustion attacks. Regular security assessments and vulnerability scanning should be implemented to identify and remediate similar weaknesses in other components of the development infrastructure. This vulnerability serves as a reminder of the critical need for robust resource management and access control mechanisms in modern software platforms, particularly those handling sensitive development workflows and collaborative environments.