CVE-2025-10871 in Enterprise Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 09/26/2025
An issue has been discovered in GitLab EE affecting all versions from 16.6 before 18.2.7, 18.3 before 18.3.3, and 18.4 before 18.4.1. Project Maintainers can exploit a vulnerability where they can assign custom roles to users with permissions exceeding their own, effectively granting themselves elevated privileges.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/30/2025
This vulnerability in GitLab Enterprise Edition represents a critical privilege escalation flaw that directly undermines the principle of least privilege within the platform's access control mechanisms. The issue affects a broad range of versions including 16.6 through 18.2.6, 18.3 through 18.3.2, and 18.4 through 18.4.0, indicating a widespread impact across multiple release lines. The vulnerability stems from insufficient validation of role assignment permissions within the project access control system, allowing malicious actors with maintainer-level privileges to arbitrarily elevate their access rights.
The technical flaw manifests when project maintainers attempt to assign custom roles to other users within the same project. Under normal circumstances, maintainers should only be able to assign roles that do not exceed their own permission levels. However, the vulnerability allows maintainers to bypass this restriction and assign roles that grant them access levels higher than their current privileges. This creates a scenario where a user with maintainer permissions can effectively escalate their access to administrator-level capabilities within the project scope. The flaw operates at the authorization layer of GitLab's security model, specifically targeting the role-based access control (RBAC) implementation that governs user permissions.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe as it enables project maintainers to gain unauthorized administrative access to their projects, potentially leading to data compromise, unauthorized code changes, and complete control over project resources. An attacker exploiting this vulnerability could modify project settings, access sensitive information, manipulate code repositories, and potentially use the elevated privileges to move laterally within the GitLab instance. This threat is particularly concerning in enterprise environments where GitLab serves as a central collaboration platform for code management and development workflows. The vulnerability creates a persistent backdoor that could remain undetected for extended periods, as the elevated privileges would appear to originate from legitimate maintainer activities rather than malicious actions.
Organizations should immediately implement the available patches for GitLab versions 18.2.7, 18.3.3, and 18.4.1 to remediate this vulnerability. In the interim, administrators should consider implementing additional monitoring controls to detect unusual role assignment activities within projects. The vulnerability aligns with CWE-276, which addresses improper privileges, and maps to ATT&CK technique T1078.004 for valid accounts and privilege escalation. Security teams should also review existing project maintainers and their assigned roles to ensure no unauthorized privilege escalation has occurred. This vulnerability demonstrates the critical importance of maintaining proper access control boundaries and implementing robust permission validation mechanisms in collaborative development platforms. The flaw underscores the necessity for regular security assessments of access control systems and the implementation of principle of least privilege enforcement across all user roles within GitLab environments.