DevOps platform GitLab this week announced the release of security updates that address a critical-severity vulnerability allowing an attacker to run pipelines as another user.
Tracked as CVE-2023-5009 (CVSS score of 9.6) and affecting all GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) versions before 16.2.7 and GitLab Community Edition (CE) versions before 16.3.4, the bug is a bypass of another flaw, CVE-2023-3932, which was addressed in August 2023.
According to GitLab’s advisory, the issue allows “an attacker to run pipelines as an arbitrary user via scheduled security scan policies”.
The original vulnerability, CVE-2023-3932, was reported via GitLab’s HackerOne bug bounty program by a researcher who explained that the attacker could trigger the issue via the scan execution policy.
The bug could be triggered without any user interaction, but the attacker needed to know the victim’s GitLab username and the name of a victim’s internal or members-only project.
By exploiting the flaw, the attacker could gain access to projects containing private code, the researcher explained.
CVE-2023-5009 too was reported through the HackerOne platform, and GitLab encourages users to update to GitLab CE and EE versions 16.3.4 and 16.2.7, which resolve the flaw.
However, the code hosting platform also notes that for GitLab versions prior to 16.2 the vulnerability only exists if the ‘Direct transfers’ and ‘Security policies’ features are enabled at the same time.
To mitigate the flaw, users that cannot upgrade to a patched version of GitLab can disable one or both these features.
“We strongly recommend that all installations running a version affected by the issues are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible,” GitLab notes.
The code hosting platform makes no mention of this vulnerability being exploited in malicious attacks.
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