Gitea CVE-2025-68941

Exploitation requires the attacker to already possess a valid Gitea API access token whose scope is explicitly limited to public resources (e.g., a public-only repository, user, organization, package, issue, notification, or ActivityPub scope), and the target must be a private resource (private repository, private org, or private package owner). The limiting factors are significant: a valid token is a prerequisite (not anonymous access despite the PR:N rating), the impact is confined to read access to private data (C:L, no integrity or availability impact), and only Gitea instances running a version before 1.22.3 are affected - upgrading to 1.22.3 fully remediates it.

This is a broken-authorization flaw (CWE-863) in Gitea where an API token scoped only to public resources is incorrectly honored for private resources, confirmed by the PR #32218 source diff which adds explicit public-only scope checks (checkTokenPublicOnly) across repository, issue, organization, user, ActivityPub, notification, and package endpoints. The published CVSS is 5.3 (Medium) with vector AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N - note the C:L/I:N/A:N impact profile correctly reflects that this is an information-disclosure/read-access issue, not code execution. The signals are consistent and point to LOW real-world urgency: EPSS is only 0.26% (17th percentile), there is no CISA KEV listing, and no public exploit was identified in the provided data. One important caveat: the official vector asserts PR:N (unauthenticated), yet the vulnerability by definition requires the attacker to already possess a valid, albeit limited-scope, API token - a prerequisite that is effectively a form of authentication. This conflict should be verified; realistically this behaves as an authenticated privilege/scope-escalation issue (PR:L) rather than a fully anonymous network attack, which further reduces practical risk. Overall this is a legitimate security fix worth patching but not an emergency.

An attacker (or a compromised integration/CI system) holds a Gitea API token that was deliberately restricted to public-resource scope, expecting it to be unable to touch private data. Because Gitea before 1.22.3 fails to enforce the public-only restriction, the attacker sends ordinary API requests to private repository, organization, user, or package endpoints and successfully reads data the token was never authorized to see. No public exploit code was identified, but the trivial attack complexity (AC:L) means exercising the flaw requires only standard API calls once a public-scoped token is available.