New Critical GitLab Vulnerability Could Allow Arbitrary CI/CD Pipeline Execution

GitLab has released security updates for Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) to address eight security flaws, including a critical bug that could allow running Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines on arbitrary branches.

Tracked as CVE-2024-9164, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.

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“An issue was discovered in GitLab EE affecting all versions starting from 12.5 prior to 17.2.9, starting from 17.3, prior to 17.3.5, and starting from 17.4 prior to 17.4.2, which allows running pipelines on arbitrary branches,” GitLab said in an advisory.

Of the remaining seven issues, four are rated high, two are rated medium, and one is rated low in severity –

• CVE-2024-8970 (CVSS score: 8.2), which allows an attacker to trigger a pipeline as another user under certain circumstances
• CVE-2024-8977 (CVSS score: 8.2), which allows SSRF attacks in GitLab EE instances with Product Analytics Dashboard configured and enabled
• CVE-2024-9631 (CVSS score: 7.5), which causes slowness when viewing diffs of merge requests with conflicts
• CVE-2024-6530 (CVSS score: 7.3), which results in HTML injection in OAuth page when authorizing a new application due to a cross-site scripting issue

The advisory is the latest wrinkle of what appears to be a steady stream of pipeline-related vulnerabilities that have been disclosed by GitLab in recent months.

Last month, the company addressed another critical flaw (CVE-2024-6678, CVSS score: 9.9) that could allow an attacker to run pipeline jobs as an arbitrary user.

Prior to that, it also patched three other similar shortcomings – CVE-2023-5009 (CVSS score: 9.6), CVE-2024-5655 (CVSS score: 9.6), and CVE-2024-6385 (CVSS score: 9.6).

While there is no evidence of active exploitation of the vulnerability, users are recommended to update their instances to the latest version to safeguard against potential threats.

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