CVE-2026-62925 in Gitea
Summary
by MITRE • 10/14/2026
Gitea parses Alpine package uploads before enforcing package-size quotas and does not bound the decompressed .PKGINFO data or its dependency and provides entry counts. An authenticated user with package-publish permission can upload a small, highly compressed archive that causes disproportionately large memory allocations during parsing and metadata generation. On memory-constrained deployments, this can terminate the process or otherwise disrupt availability.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/14/2026
The vulnerability identified in Gitea represents a critical resource exhaustion flaw rooted in the application's package management subsystem, specifically affecting how Alpine Linux packages are processed upon upload. This issue stems from an architectural oversight where the system parses and decompresses incoming archive files before validating them against configured size quotas or other security policies. By prioritizing parsing over quota enforcement, Gitea exposes itself to a classic resource exhaustion attack vector often categorized under CWE-400, which describes uncontrolled resource consumption. The core technical flaw lies in the lack of bounds checking on the decompressed .PKGINFO data structure and its associated dependency lists. When an authenticated user with package-publish permissions uploads a specially crafted archive that is highly compressed but contains metadata designed to expand significantly upon decompression, the application allocates memory proportional to this expanded size rather than the original file size. This discrepancy allows attackers to bypass storage limits by sending small files on disk that result in massive memory allocations during processing.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability poses a severe threat to service availability, particularly for deployments running on servers with limited RAM or strict resource constraints. The disproportionate memory allocation triggered by parsing the maliciously crafted package can rapidly deplete available system resources. In worst-case scenarios, this leads to out-of-memory conditions that cause the Gitea process to crash or become unresponsive, effectively resulting in a denial of service for all users accessing the instance. Even if the process does not fully terminate, significant performance degradation may occur as the system struggles with excessive memory pressure and garbage collection overhead. This aligns closely with ATT&CK technique T1496, Resource Hijacking, where an adversary uses computing resources to disrupt availability or perform other malicious activities such as cryptomining, although in this specific context, the primary impact is service disruption rather than resource theft for external gain.
Mitigating this vulnerability requires a multi-layered approach focusing on input validation and resource management within the package handling pipeline. The most immediate fix involves reordering operations so that size quotas and basic structural validations are enforced before any significant parsing or decompression occurs. Implementing strict limits on the maximum allowed size of decompressed metadata, as well as bounding the number of entries in dependency lists, is essential to prevent excessive memory allocation regardless of compression ratios. Additionally, introducing depth limits for recursive data structures during JSON or similar format parsing can further harden the application against such attacks. For administrators unable to apply an immediate patch, restricting package-publish permissions to only trusted users and monitoring system memory usage for anomalous spikes related to Gitea processes can provide temporary relief while ensuring that deployment environments have sufficient headroom to absorb occasional large allocations without crashing.