CVE-2025-5069 in Community Edition
Summary
by MITRE • 09/26/2025
An issue has been discovered in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 17.10 before 18.2.7, 18.3 before 18.3.3, and 18.4 before 18.4.1 that could have allowed an authenticated user to gain unauthorized access to confidential issues by creating a project with an identical name to the victim's project.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/27/2025
This vulnerability in GitLab CE/EE represents a critical access control flaw that exploits the system's project naming mechanism to enable unauthorized information disclosure. The issue affects versions across multiple release branches including 17.10 through 18.2.6, 18.3 through 18.3.2, and 18.4 through 18.4.0, indicating a widespread impact across the GitLab platform. The vulnerability stems from insufficient validation of project names during creation processes, allowing malicious actors to exploit naming collisions to access confidential issues within victim projects. This type of vulnerability falls under CWE-284 Access Control, specifically addressing improper access control mechanisms that permit unauthorized access to protected resources.
The technical implementation of this flaw occurs when an authenticated user creates a project with a name that exactly matches an existing project owned by another user. When this naming collision occurs, the system fails to properly enforce access controls, potentially allowing the attacker to view confidential issues within the victim's project. The vulnerability exploits the fundamental principle that project names should be unique within a given namespace or scope, and when this uniqueness constraint is violated, the system's access control mechanisms become compromised. This issue particularly affects the issue tracking functionality where confidential information is stored, as the attacker can gain access to sensitive data that should only be visible to authorized project members.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple information disclosure to potentially enable more sophisticated attacks. An attacker could leverage this flaw to gain insights into project timelines, security vulnerabilities, and development strategies of other users. The attack vector requires authentication, making it a privilege escalation issue rather than a direct public exploit, but it still represents a significant breach in the security model. The vulnerability could be exploited to gather intelligence for further attacks or to identify potential security weaknesses in target projects. According to ATT&CK framework, this maps to T1046 Network Service Scanning and T1566 Phishing, as attackers could use the leaked information to craft more targeted social engineering campaigns.
Mitigation strategies should focus on implementing proper project name validation and access control enforcement mechanisms. Organizations should immediately upgrade to the patched versions 18.2.7, 18.3.3, or 18.4.1 to resolve this vulnerability. Additionally, administrators should implement monitoring for project creation activities, particularly those involving names that closely resemble existing projects. The system should enforce stricter uniqueness constraints for project names within user namespaces and implement proper access control checks even when naming conflicts occur. Security teams should also consider implementing automated scanning tools to detect potential naming collisions and alert administrators to suspicious project creation patterns. This vulnerability highlights the importance of proper input validation and access control enforcement in distributed development platforms where multiple users share common namespaces and resources.