Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
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AccessAuthenticate as group Owner
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ExploitAccess group Duo/AI settings page
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ExecutionRe-enable Duo despite admin lock
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ImpactAI data egress to third-party service for group and descendants
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A01:2025 - Broken Access Control
ASVS 5.0
V8 - Authorization Authorization logic validation
MITRE ATT&CK
1 technique across 1 tactic: Privilege Escalation The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Exploitation Conditions | Two concrete prerequisites must both hold: (1) the attacker must be an authenticated user with group Owner permissions on the target group, and (2) an instance administrator must have previously locked that group's GitLab Duo availability - the flaw only manifests as a bypass of that specific admin lock. Exploitation is further limited to GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) running affected versions (19.2 up to 19.3.6, 19.4 up to 19.4.3, 19.5 up to 19.5.1); it does not apply to Community Edition or to instances where no Duo admin lock was configured. The high privilege requirement (group Owner) is the primary limiting factor, confining this to trusted insiders rather than arbitrary authenticated users. |
| Impact | This is a genuinely low-priority issue, and the signals are consistent in saying so. The CVSS 3.1 vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N, base 2.7) correctly reflects that exploitation requires an already-trusted, highly-privileged actor - an authenticated user holding group Owner permissions (PR:H) - and yields only a low integrity impact with no confidentiality or availability loss. This is an authorization-enforcement weakness (CWE-863) where the admin-lock on group Duo availability was insufficiently granular, letting a group Owner re-enable AI-backed data egress the administrator had intended to prohibit. Publicly available exploit code exists (via a HackerOne report), but there is NO CISA KEV listing and no EPSS score was provided in the input, so there is no evidence of active or widespread exploitation - POC availability and active exploitation are distinct signals and only the former is present here. The practical risk is a governance/policy-bypass by an insider rather than a path to data breach or code execution; the 'damage' is that an administrator's org-wide AI data-governance control can be overridden by a group Owner, causing group and descendant-project data to egress to a third-party AI service. No conflicting signals were found between the CVSS vector and the description - both agree on network vector, high privilege, and limited impact. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | In a GitLab EE instance where the administrator has deliberately locked GitLab Duo off for data-governance or compliance reasons, a user who holds Owner on a group navigates to that group's AI/Duo settings and re-enables Duo for the group and its descendant projects, defeating the admin lock. Public exploit code for this bypass exists (HackerOne report #3871692). Because the flaw is network-reachable (AV:N) and low-complexity (AC:L) but requires group Owner privileges (PR:H), it is realistically an insider/privilege-abuse scenario rather than remote unauthenticated compromise. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Oct 22, 2026
GitLab Enterprise Edition lets a group Owner re-enable AI-backed GitLab Duo data egress for their group and all descendant projects even after an instance administrator has explicitly locked Duo availability for that group, defeating the administrator's control (CWE-863). Only EE instances on 19.2 before 19.3.6, 19.4 before 19.4.3, and 19.5 before 19.5.1 are affected, and only where an admin lock was actually configured; Community Edition and instances without a Duo lock are unaffected. Requirements are strict - an authenticated group Owner on the target group (CVSS PR:H, 2.7 score) - so this is a trusted-insider bypass with limited integrity impact, not a mass-exploitable flaw; publicly available exploit code exists via a HackerOne report, and no active exploitation has been confirmed (not in CISA KEV).
RemediationAI
Vendor-released patch: upgrade to 19.3.6, 19.4.3, or 19.5.1 depending on your release line, per the GitLab patch release advisory at https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitlab-19-5-1-released/. Until upgrading, verify every group where an administrator intended Duo to be locked, since a group Owner may have silently re-enabled it; GitLab audit events for group setting changes can be used to identify who toggled Duo availability and when. As a compensating control, temporarily narrow group Owner membership to the minimum set of users who genuinely need it (trade-off: slower group administration and possible bottlenecking on owner-only actions), and, where AI egress is strictly prohibited, enforce it at the network layer by blocking outbound traffic from the GitLab instance to third-party AI/model provider endpoints (trade-off: this can break other Duo features and any legitimate integrations unless scoped to specific hosts). Re-check Duo availability across all groups after any membership or settings change until the patched version is deployed.
Affected VersionsENISA
Affected Packages
Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)
Affects your stack
Affects 1 package in euvd
Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
GitLab Duo is GitLab's suite of AI-assisted features, some of which send repository and project context to third-party model providers - i.e., data egress outside the GitLab instance. Administrators can lock Duo availability at the group level to prevent that egress. The root cause is CWE-863 (Incorrect Authorization): the admin-lock enforcement was not granular enough, so the same group-level setting a group Owner can edit through normal group configuration was not reliably gated against the admin-imposed lock. The result is a privilege bypass across a trust boundary rather than a memory-safety or injection bug - the group Owner can restore a state the administrator deliberately prohibited. The CVSS vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N reflects network-reachable, low-complexity exploitation that still demands high privileges (group Owner) and produces only a low integrity impact with no confidentiality or availability effect, since the practical consequence is that AI data egress resumes for the group and its descendant projects.
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Severity by source
AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Requires group Owner privileges so PR:H; network-reachable web UI with no special complexity (AV:N/AC:L); impact is limited to overriding one governance setting, so I:L and C:N/A:N.
Primary rating from Vendor (GitLab).
CVSS VectorVendor: GitLab
Lifecycle Timeline
2DescriptionCVE.org
GitLab has remediated an issue in GitLab EE affecting all versions from 19.2 before 19.3.6, 19.4 before 19.4.3, and 19.5 before 19.5.1 that, when an instance administrator locked a group's Duo availability, an authenticated user with group Owner permissions could have re-enabled AI-backed data egress to a third-party service for that group and its descendant projects, due to insufficient granularity of the admin-lock enforcement controls.
Threat Intelligence Overview
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Authentication bypass attacks exploit flaws in the verification mechanisms that control access to systems and applications.
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Remote code execution in GitLab CE/EE (all versions from 19.2 before 19.2.8, 19.3 before 19.3.5, and 19.4 before 19.4.2)
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EUVD-2026-107675
GHSA-x828-vfgm-5mgh
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
VulDB
Exploit-DB