gitoxide CVE-2026-82254

Exploitation requires the victim's gitoxide process to perform a clone or fetch operation against a Git remote controlled by the attacker, or for an attacker to intercept an unencrypted git:// protocol connection between the victim and a legitimate server. No authentication to the victim system is required - the attack is fully unauthenticated from the victim's perspective. The vulnerability triggers in the standard pack data processing path, so any clone or fetch is sufficient; no special gitoxide configuration or feature flag is needed. Exploitation is strictly limited to denial-of-service (process panic or OOM kill); no code execution or data exfiltration is possible. Deployments where gitoxide is used exclusively to access internally-controlled repositories with no external or user-supplied remote URLs are not exposed.

The CVSS 4.0 vector (AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VA:H) is well-supported by the described mechanics - exploitation requires only a network connection to a malicious Git remote, no authentication to the victim system, and no user interaction beyond initiating a clone or fetch. The availability impact is high because both vectors cause immediate, unrecoverable process termination (panic or OOM kill). EPSS data was not provided in the available intelligence sources, so exploitation probability cannot be quantified beyond the CVSS signal. The vulnerability is not in CISA KEV and no public proof-of-concept exploit code has been identified at the time of analysis. Real-world risk is concentrated in CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, and automated Git clients that use gitoxide and perform fetches from external or user-controlled repositories; internally-only deployments with no external fetch surface are unexposed. The uncapped allocation bug deserves particular attention because a single 10-byte malicious pack entry can exhaust host memory before any content is inspected, making it resistant to timeout or rate-limit mitigations at the application layer.

An attacker operating or compromising a Git server (or performing MitM on an unencrypted git:// connection) serves a crafted pack file to a victim running gitoxide. The malicious pack entry encodes a decompressed object size of hundreds of terabytes in a 10-byte LEB128 header; gitoxide calls Vec::with_capacity() with this attacker-supplied value before decompressing any data, immediately exhausting system memory and triggering an OOM kill that disrupts the victim's CI/CD pipeline or developer environment. A simpler variant sends a truncated delta payload that panics the apply() function on the first unguarded data[i] access, achieving the same crash with even less payload complexity.