GitLab has issued security releases, versions 16.9.1, 16.8.3, and 16.7.6, for both GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), addressing critical vulnerabilities that pose potential security risks. Users are strongly advised to upgrade their GitLab installations promptly to mitigate these security concerns. The identified vulnerabilities encompass a range of issues, including high-severity concerns such as stored cross-site scripting (XSS) in the user’s profile page, medium-severity risks like a user with “admin_group_members” permission inviting other groups to gain owner access, and a variety of other issues such as a regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS) problem and bypassing group IP restriction settings. Each vulnerability is assigned a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score, and the security patches provided in the latest releases aim to address these issues effectively.
One notable high-severity vulnerability in GitLab CE/EE version 16.9 involves a stored XSS risk in the user’s profile page. Crafted payloads added to this page could lead to stored XSS on the client side, enabling attackers to perform arbitrary actions on behalf of victims. Another critical vulnerability, albeit medium-severity, was identified in GitLab EE versions 16.5 to 16.9, allowing users with the “admin_group_member” permission to potentially make themselves or others owners of a group, resulting in privilege escalation. Additionally, several other medium and
