CVE-2026-119625 in Gitea
Summary
by MITRE • 11/01/2026
The `/{username}` web route accepted personal access tokens over HTTP Basic authentication without checking their scope. A token confined to an unrelated scope, such as `read:issue`, could read its owner's private activity through the user RSS/Atom feed and the profile activity tab, and other members' activity in a private organization through the organization feed; a public-only token could list the owner's private repositories and organizations and render private profile READMEs. For a site administrator's token this applied to every account. Tokens are now accepted on this route only for feeds, which require `read:user` or `read:organization`.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 11/01/2026
The vulnerability identified in this report stems from an insufficient access control mechanism within the web application routing logic, specifically affecting endpoints designed to serve user and organization activity feeds. The core technical flaw lies in the authentication handler for the username-based route, which accepted personal access tokens via HTTP Basic Authentication without validating whether the token possessed the necessary scopes required by the specific resource being accessed. This oversight allowed a significant discrepancy between the intended security model and its actual enforcement, enabling privilege escalation through scope bypassing rather than traditional exploitation of code logic errors or buffer overflows.
From an industry standard perspective, this flaw is classified under CWE-269: Improper Privilege Management, as it involves granting access to resources without verifying that the actor has been granted explicit permission for those specific actions. Furthermore, in the context of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, this behavior aligns with T1078: Valid Accounts and potentially T1530: Data from Cloud Storage Object Discovery if used to enumerate private repositories or organizations. The vulnerability effectively allowed an attacker possessing a token with limited permissions, such as read access to issues only, to bypass those restrictions by targeting endpoints that did not enforce scope checks at the route level.
The operational impact of this vulnerability was severe due to its potential for information disclosure and data exfiltration. An adversary utilizing a personal access token confined to an unrelated or lower-privilege scope could successfully read their own private activity through user RSS and Atom feeds, as well as view profile activity tabs that were intended to be restricted. More critically, if the victim was part of a private organization, the attacker could also retrieve activity from other members within that organization via the organization feed endpoint. This capability effectively neutralized the granularity of scope-based access controls, turning low-privilege tokens into high-privilege data harvesting tools.
In scenarios involving public-only tokens or broader account compromises, the impact extended to structural enumeration and content exposure. Attackers could list private repositories and organizations associated with a user profile, thereby mapping out an organization's internal structure even if they lacked direct access rights to those assets. Additionally, private profile READMEs were rendered accessible, exposing sensitive project descriptions, contact information, or other proprietary details that users had intentionally kept hidden from public view. For site administrators whose tokens possessed elevated privileges, this flaw applied universally across every account on the platform, potentially allowing a compromised low-level admin token to harvest data from all user accounts if routed through these specific endpoints.
The remediation strategy implemented by the development team focused on enforcing strict scope validation at the route level rather than relying solely on application logic downstream in the request processing pipeline. The fix restricts the acceptance of personal access tokens on this specific username-based route exclusively to feed-related operations, which are now gated behind mandatory requirements for either read:user or read:organization scopes. This change ensures that any token attempting to access these endpoints must explicitly declare and possess the appropriate permissions corresponding to the data being requested. By aligning authentication validation with resource-specific authorization policies, the system restores the integrity of its scope-based security model and prevents unauthorized enumeration or reading of private user and organizational data through feed interfaces.