Multiple GitLab Vulnerabilities Enables Account Takeover and Stored XSS Exploitation

GitLab has released emergency security patches addressing multiple critical vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to perform account takeovers and execute stored cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. 

The patches were released on August 13, 2025, affecting GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) across versions 18.2.2, 18.1.4, and 18.0.6.

Key Takeaways
1. GitLab patched three high-severity flaws.
2. Update immediately to versions 18.0.6, 18.1.4, or 18.2.2 to prevent exploitation.
3. Affects all GitLab editions with some vulnerabilities dating back to version 14.2.

Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities

Three high-severity XSS vulnerabilities with CVSS scores of 8.7 pose significant threats to GitLab users. 

CVE-2025-6186 represents the most critical flaw, allowing authenticated users to achieve account takeover by injecting malicious HTML content into work item names. This vulnerability affects GitLab CE/EE versions from 18.1 before 18.1.4 and 18.2 before 18.2.2.

CVE-2025-7734 impacts the blob viewer component, enabling attackers to execute actions on behalf of users by injecting malicious content under certain conditions. 

This vulnerability affects all versions from 14.2 before the patched releases. CVE-2025-7739 specifically targets scoped label descriptions, allowing authenticated users to achieve stored XSS by injecting malicious HTML content. This flaw affects only GitLab version 18.2 before 18.2.2.

The CVSS vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N indicates these vulnerabilities can be exploited over networks with low attack complexity, requiring only low privileges and user interaction.

Permission and Authorization Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-8094 addresses an improper handling of permissions issue in the project API, with a CVSS score of 7.7. 

This vulnerability could allow authenticated users with maintainer privileges to cause denial of service to other users’ CI/CD pipelines by manipulating shared infrastructure resources beyond their intended access level.

Several medium-severity vulnerabilities compound the security risks, including CVE-2024-12303 for incorrect privilege assignment in delete issues operations and CVE-2024-10219 for incorrect authorization in jobs API that could allow bypassing access controls to download private artifacts.

CVE	Title	CVSS 3.1 Score	Severity
CVE-2025-7734	Cross-site scripting issue in blob viewer impacts GitLab CE/EE	8.7	High
CVE-2025-7739	Cross-site scripting issue in labels impacts GitLab CE/EE	8.7	High
CVE-2025-6186	Cross-site scripting issue in Workitem impacts GitLab CE/EE	8.7	High
CVE-2025-8094	Improper Handling of Permissions issue in project API impacts GitLab CE/EE	7.7	High
CVE-2024-12303	Incorrect Privilege Assignment issue in delete issues operation impacts GitLab CE/EE	6.7	Medium
CVE-2025-2614	Allocation of Resources Without Limits issue in release name creation impacts GitLab CE/EE	6.5	Medium
CVE-2024-10219	Incorrect Authorization issue in jobs API impacts GitLab CE/EE	6.5	Medium
CVE-2025-8770	Authorization issue in Merge request approval policy impacts GitLab EE	6.5	Medium
CVE-2025-2937	Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity issue in wiki impacts GitLab CE/EE	6.5	Medium
CVE-2025-1477	Allocation of Resources Without Limits issue in Mattermost integration impacts GitLab CE/EE	6.5	Medium
CVE-2025-5819	Incorrect Permission Assignment issue in ID token impacts GitLab CE/EE	5.0	Medium
CVE-2025-2498	Insufficient Access Control issue in IP Restriction impacts GitLab EE	3.1	Low

Mitigations

GitLab strongly recommends immediate upgrades to the latest patched versions for all self-managed installations. 

The vulnerabilities were discovered through GitLab’s HackerOne bug bounty program by security researchers, including joaxcar, yvvdwf, abdelrahman_maged, and others.

GitLab.com instances are already running patched versions, while GitLab Dedicated customers require no action. 

The patches include both regular migrations and post-deploy migrations that may impact upgrade processes, particularly for single-node instances, which will experience downtime during upgrades.

Organizations should prioritize these updates as the combination of account takeover capabilities and XSS exploitation vectors presents significant security risks to development workflows and sensitive code repositories.

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