GitLab Critical Patch Release (docs.gitlab.com)
164 pointsby artooro3 hours ago35 comments
jimmyl02 2 hours ago
Awesome find by https://hackerone.com/joaxcar and it's a little bit frightening that this severe of a bug isn't the biggest security vulnerability of today
ezekg an hour ago
Is this a bug in GitLab or in Ruby? It's hard to tell from the report and the patch...
pqdbr an hour ago
Or Rails...
Thaxll 2 hours ago
What a great week security wise!
minimaxir an hour ago
And Fable 5.5 isn't even out yet!
perlgeek 2 hours ago
Back in perl 5.8 and older, the regex engine worked by recusing at the level of C functions, and so you could trigger stack overflows by giving it large strings.
Is this similar?
I wonder why gitlab even has its own regex compiler. Or is this a vulnerability in an underlying library or programming language?
wiml an hour ago
Looks like Gitlab ships its own forked copy of the Ruby Onigmo regex engine.
miduil an hour ago
At least second regex related CVE in GitLab in the past few weeks. Awful to see that the endpoint is reachable unauthenticated, but I'm glad that they provide guidance in how to check the logs for attempts of exploitation
dvdkon an hour ago
As far as I can tell, it requires forcing GitLab to render a malicious org-mode file. I don't really see a way to do that without authenticating and uploading one. Am I missing something?
merb 11 minutes ago
The attack needs no authentication — only one public project that can hold the .org payload.
beaconflint 2 hours ago
If you're patching a fleet, gitlab-rake gitlab:env:info gives you the exact version per node, faster than guessing from the omnibus package name.
hobofan 37 minutes ago
This is shaping up to be the single worst security news day ever. Given the role that AI played in some of the discoveries, one has to wonder if this marks the start of some dark age of IT security.
smashed 28 minutes ago
This has been going on for months actually with no end in sight.
choilive 27 minutes ago
I think this marks the beginning of the golden age. Investments in automated agent driven security scans on all software is coming to every business. Software and infrastructure will become more secure than ever before.
hobofan 6 minutes ago
I also hope that we come out in a golden age, but we are very much in for a rough few months/years where all the low hanging fruit is being picked up until we end up with much more hardened systems.
cobzilla 25 minutes ago
Buckle up
taspeotis 18 minutes ago
What? More like a golden age of security. AI is ripping the bandaid off right now. At the end of this software is going to be a lot more secure.
bon0r 2 hours ago
possible bug? or too soon to check? :)
after updating a pop-up still shows:
"You are currently on version 19.5.1! We strongly recommend upgrading your GitLab installation immediately."
while 19.5.1 should be the latest and fixed version
artooro an hour ago
Their update checker has never worked very well. It takes hours to stop getting the upgrade warning inside of the GitLab dashboard.
merb an hour ago
I have that aswell…
But I also updated pretty early.
minraws 2 hours ago
I am concerned for my self hosted servers, well only hope is tailscale should be entirely secure, and egress is filtered heavily... If that doesn't work my home lab is fucked.
Any suggestions folks, not even my terminally online self can handle all of these.
freedomben 13 minutes ago
as a fellow self-hoster, this is a rough time to be us
switchbak 7 minutes ago
I recently jammed all my stuff behind Tailscale. I sure hope that doesn't burn me.
But it's a lot better than having things live on the open internet!
Also looking at those old C++ services a whole lot differently now.
tptacek 3 hours ago
"CVSS 10.0" isn't in the headline here and a CVSS of 10 doesn't actually mean anything.
phoe-krk 3 hours ago
Deeper in the article: https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitla...
GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression. (...)
CVSS 10.0 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H)
Here, CVSS 10.0 means arbitrary remote code execution.
tptacek 3 hours ago
"Arbitrary RCE" does mean something. "CVSS 10.0" does not. We should be using the article headline here.
phoe-krk 2 hours ago
Truth be told, I don't think that "GitLab Critical Patch Release: 19.5.1, 19.4.3, 19.3.6, 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, 18.11.13" is a more descriptive title, even taking the HN guidelines into account. It could be better, sure, but it's not horrible (IMO).
tptacek 2 hours ago
It's an editorialization. The submitter is saying something about the importance of CVSS that the article does not. A better title would say "Remote Code Execution" where it says "CVSS 10.0" now.
artooro an hour ago
Good point guys, I've updated the title.
TZubiri 2 hours ago
>CVSS of 10 doesn't actually mean anything.
Might you perchance be exaggerating?
tptacek 2 hours ago
No? CVSS is a Ouija board. Citrix directory traversal got scored 10.0. So did a Cisco Broadworks SSO bypass. Meanwhile, Shellshock did not.
CVSS is like the Pitchfork Music ratings scale. It communicates false precision, and it's easy to point to places where that precision misleads (D-plan's "Emergency & I" is not better than every Yo La Tengo album).
TZubiri 2 hours ago
Have you read signal/noise theory? That a signal isn't perfect (that it contains false positives or positive falses in case of binary signals, or that it has a delta between the signal and the underlying phenomenon) doesn't mean that it carries no information.
For example if I cry wolf 50% of the time, but 100% of the times there's a wolf I cry wolf. Then no matter what the frequency of wolf sightings are, my crying wolf carries some information (unless there's always a wolf). Assume there's a wolf 1% of the nights, then I will cry wolf 50% of the time, and you only need to check for a wolf 50% of the nights rather than 100%.
It's worth noting that there's still technically signal even if I sometimes miss a wolf, even if you may choose to ignore that signal in order to pursue 100% accuracy yourself.
nikanj an hour ago
It's more like: you work as an animal spotter, and if you tell people you saw a hamster, you'll get no glory. So obviously you spotted a direwolf at least 12 feet tall.
ivanjermakov 2 hours ago
Because "10 out of 10" is a better headline for the average reader than "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H".
Retr0id 2 hours ago
Sometimes CVSS 10 "oversells" the true severity of a bug but this doesn't seem to be one of those cases.