GitLab Critical Security Flaw Let Attacker Execute Arbitrary Code

GitLab has released fixes for two security flaws in Git that are of critical severity and might allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code and take advantage of integer overflows.

The flaws, identified as CVE-2022-41903 and CVE-2022-23521, were patched in the recent release, which includes all new Git versions released after v2.30.7.

Details of the Vulnerabilities:

CVE-2022-41903

The service’s commit formatting component, which enables the display of commits in arbitrary formats, is vulnerable to the first flaw. An integer overflow could occur when padding operators are processed.

As soon as the overflow happens, it might result in arbitrary heap writes, which might allow threat actors to execute code remotely (RCE).

CVE-2022-23521

The second security issue affects the way Git’s gitattributes parsing mechanism defines path attributes. Multiple integer overflows could result from parsing gitattributes in a number of circumstances.

“When parsing gitattributes, multiple integer overflows can occur when there is a huge number of path patterns, a huge number of attributes for a single pattern, or when the declared attribute names are huge”, GitLab.

This integer overflow can result in arbitrary heap reads and writes, which may result in remote code execution.

These flaws were discovered as part of a security source code audit of Git sponsored by OSTIF by security experts from X41 (Eric Sesterhenn and Markus Vervier) and GitLab (Joern Schneeweisz).

“The most severe issue discovered allows an attacker to trigger a heap-based memory corruption during a clone or pull operations, which might result in code execution. Another critical issue allows code execution during an archive operation, which is commonly performed by Git forges,” according to X41 security experts.

“Additionally, a huge number of integer related issues was identified which may lead to denial-of-service situations, out-of-bound reads or simply badly handled corner cases on large input.”

“We strongly recommend that all installations running a version affected by the issues [..] are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible,” GitLab

Hence, upgrading to the most recent Git release (v2.39.1) is always the best method to guard against attacks that attempt to make use of these vulnerabilities.

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