Awesome find by https://hackerone.com/joaxcar and it's a little bit frightening that this severe of a bug isn't the biggest security vulnerability of today
xmcp123 3 hours ago [-]
It’s the 2020s baby, this one is lucky to break the top 3!
jacquesm 2 hours ago [-]
Give it an hour or so and there will be a bigger one.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
miduil 7 hours ago [-]
At least second regex related CVE in GitLab in the past few weeks. Awful to see that the endpoint is reachable unauthenticated, but I'm glad that they provide guidance in how to check the logs for attempts of exploitation
dvdkon 7 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell, it requires forcing GitLab to render a malicious org-mode file. I don't really see a way to do that without authenticating and uploading one. Am I missing something?
merb 6 hours ago [-]
The attack needs no authentication — only one public project that can hold the .org payload.
So probably not vulnerable if no public projects exist - ie self hosted has an needs auth for everything mode.
ezekg 7 hours ago [-]
Is this a bug in GitLab or in Ruby? It's hard to tell from the report and the patch...
The module in that diff being called "onig" is quite unfortunate, the error codes look like a slur.
pqdbr 7 hours ago [-]
Or Rails...
perlgeek 8 hours ago [-]
Back in perl 5.8 and older, the regex engine worked by recusing at the level of C functions, and so you could trigger stack overflows by giving it large strings.
Is this similar?
I wonder why gitlab even has its own regex compiler. Or is this a vulnerability in an underlying library or programming language?
wiml 7 hours ago [-]
Looks like Gitlab ships its own forked copy of the Ruby Onigmo regex engine.
ezekg 4 hours ago [-]
Why? Is/was Ruby vulnerable?
beaconflint 8 hours ago [-]
If you're patching a fleet, gitlab-rake gitlab:env:info gives you the exact version per node, faster than guessing from the omnibus package name.
yoyohello13 4 hours ago [-]
Gitlab has had a lot lately. I’ve had to patch every other week for the last few months
Gigachad 17 minutes ago [-]
Gitlab is probably more prominent since it's a large enterprise piece of software that's self hosted. Every bug in a library used by Gitlab becomes a problem for Gitlab. While hosted platforms like Github can just update the library and not have to make an announcement.
1over137 2 hours ago [-]
And it's not even written in C! /s
bon0r 8 hours ago [-]
possible bug? or too soon to check? :)
after updating a pop-up still shows:
"You are currently on version 19.5.1! We strongly recommend upgrading your GitLab installation immediately."
while 19.5.1 should be the latest and fixed version
artooro 7 hours ago [-]
Their update checker has never worked very well. It takes hours to stop getting the upgrade warning inside of the GitLab dashboard.
merb 7 hours ago [-]
I have that aswell…
But I also updated pretty early.
mqus 5 hours ago [-]
same here, but with 19.4.3
Thaxll 8 hours ago [-]
What a great week security wise!
joshAg 6 hours ago [-]
Lemon, it's wendesday
cogogo 5 hours ago [-]
I picked the wrong week to stop drinking coffee.
reaperducer 5 hours ago [-]
I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
SOLAR_FIELDS 1 hours ago [-]
You should go backto the glue it’s not a good idea to be normal about this. We should all be sniffing glue Charlie day style
dmd 4 hours ago [-]
I picked the wrong week
blackmesaind 6 hours ago [-]
It's only Wednesday, plenty of week to go.
marcellosso 5 hours ago [-]
Sir, it is only wednesday
tharkun__ 4 hours ago [-]
You spelled Wendy's wrong.
7 hours ago [-]
jaequery 5 hours ago [-]
is this a taste of things to come?
brlewis 2 hours ago [-]
No. Like the PHP vulnerability, this was a bug in a language interpreter written in C, and a bug that would not be possible in most newer languages. Even as secure-by-design becomes more prevalent, there will be vulnerabilities, but this one is a taste of the past.
hobofan 7 hours ago [-]
This is shaping up to be the single worst security news day ever. Given the role that AI played in some of the discoveries, one has to wonder if this marks the start of some dark age of IT security.
smashed 6 hours ago [-]
This has been going on for months actually with no end in sight.
hobofan 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm not enough in the weeds to see it as much, but the last few months seem to have been a much slower trickle of "how did we not catch this" exploits, while they are now appearing with much more sophisticated (though still usable in practice) exploit chains on much larger target codebases.
The last few months seem to have been a lot more imunder control with also the frontier labs more warning of "what happens when Mythos-class model get in the hands of everyone" than that actually becoming reality. Now, it appears to be actuually turning into reality.
UltraSane 4 hours ago [-]
It depends on the net rate of new bugs being made vs the bugs discovered and fixed. Hopefully AI can find bugs faster than new ones are being created.
choilive 6 hours ago [-]
I think this marks the beginning of the golden age. Investments in automated agent driven security scans on all software is coming to every business. Software and infrastructure will become more secure than ever before.
hobofan 6 hours ago [-]
I also hope that we come out in a golden age, but we are very much in for a rough few months/years where all the low hanging fruit is being picked up until we end up with much more hardened systems.
vee-kay 6 hours ago [-]
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reddalo 5 hours ago [-]
> the single worst security news day ever
I'd say, the single worst security news day for now
esseph 6 hours ago [-]
Did you go to sleep in 2015 and then wake up just now in 2026?
cobzilla 6 hours ago [-]
Buckle up
taspeotis 6 hours ago [-]
What? More like a golden age of security. AI is ripping the bandaid off right now. At the end of this software is going to be a lot more secure.
Gigachad 4 hours ago [-]
That's where we will end up, but the in between time is the worst time ever for trying to secure an internet connected computer.
jacquesm 2 hours ago [-]
> At the end of this software is going to be a lot more secure.
Can I get that in writing?
As we speak more slop is added to the pile, far more than can reasonably be reviewed and a lot of that code will be insecure.
131hn 6 hours ago [-]
Using AI agent to apply patches & upgrade is now mandatory to keep up with the pace.
preisschild 4 minutes ago [-]
Dont even need "AI" for that. Just renovate.
5 hours ago [-]
nozzlegear 5 hours ago [-]
Cross your fingers and pucker your butt that it doesn't fuck it up.
jamesfinlayson 4 hours ago [-]
Years ago I worked at a company that had a nightly cronjob for yum to apply security updates (with a couple of important exceptions that were handled manually). Always seemed very iffy to me for such a big company where downtime was very expensive.
nullsanity 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jraph 5 hours ago [-]
Good luck with the security and the stability of a system managed like this.
GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression. (...)
Here, CVSS 10.0 means arbitrary remote code execution.
tptacek 9 hours ago [-]
"Arbitrary RCE" does mean something. "CVSS 10.0" does not. We should be using the article headline here.
phoe-krk 8 hours ago [-]
Truth be told, I don't think that "GitLab Critical Patch Release: 19.5.1, 19.4.3, 19.3.6, 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, 18.11.13" is a more descriptive title, even taking the HN guidelines into account. It could be better, sure, but it's not horrible (IMO).
tptacek 8 hours ago [-]
It's an editorialization. The submitter is saying something about the importance of CVSS that the article does not. A better title would say "Remote Code Execution" where it says "CVSS 10.0" now.
artooro 7 hours ago [-]
Good point guys, I've updated the title.
ivanjermakov 8 hours ago [-]
Because "10 out of 10" is a better headline for the average reader than "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H".
Retr0id 8 hours ago [-]
Sometimes CVSS 10 "oversells" the true severity of a bug but this doesn't seem to be one of those cases.
TZubiri 8 hours ago [-]
>CVSS of 10 doesn't actually mean anything.
Might you perchance be exaggerating?
tptacek 8 hours ago [-]
No? CVSS is a Ouija board. Citrix directory traversal got scored 10.0. So did a Cisco Broadworks SSO bypass. Meanwhile, Shellshock did not.
CVSS is like the Pitchfork Music ratings scale. It communicates false precision, and it's easy to point to places where that precision misleads (D-plan's "Emergency & I" is not better than every Yo La Tengo album).
TZubiri 8 hours ago [-]
Have you read signal/noise theory? That a signal isn't perfect (that it contains false positives or positive falses in case of binary signals, or that it has a delta between the signal and the underlying phenomenon) doesn't mean that it carries no information.
For example if I cry wolf 50% of the time, but 100% of the times there's a wolf I cry wolf. Then no matter what the frequency of wolf sightings are, my crying wolf carries some information (unless there's always a wolf). Assume there's a wolf 1% of the nights, then I will cry wolf 50% of the time, and you only need to check for a wolf 50% of the nights rather than 100%.
It's worth noting that there's still technically signal even if I sometimes miss a wolf, even if you may choose to ignore that signal in order to pursue 100% accuracy yourself.
nikanj 7 hours ago [-]
It's more like: you work as an animal spotter, and if you tell people you saw a hamster, you'll get no glory. So obviously you spotted a direwolf at least 12 feet tall.
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
Interestingly CVSS was designed to help with this specific issue. You are complaining that the system is imperfect, but you fail to imagine how it works without such a system, everyone tagging their issue as critical.
CVSS is good, it's better than nothing.
minraws 8 hours ago [-]
I am concerned for my self hosted servers, well only hope is tailscale should be entirely secure, and egress is filtered heavily... If that doesn't work my home lab is fucked.
Any suggestions folks, not even my terminally online self can handle all of these.
switchbak 6 hours ago [-]
I recently jammed all my stuff behind Tailscale. I sure hope that doesn't burn me.
But it's a lot better than having things live on the open internet!
Also looking at those old C++ services a whole lot differently now.
acidburnNSA 5 hours ago [-]
Yup just going through the anxiety here. I even self-host my personal e-mail! This is not going to end well.
freedomben 6 hours ago [-]
as a fellow self-hoster, this is a rough time to be us
nullsanity 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
valiant-comma 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
murillojndem 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 04:18:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Is this similar?
I wonder why gitlab even has its own regex compiler. Or is this a vulnerability in an underlying library or programming language?
after updating a pop-up still shows:
"You are currently on version 19.5.1! We strongly recommend upgrading your GitLab installation immediately."
while 19.5.1 should be the latest and fixed version
But I also updated pretty early.
The last few months seem to have been a lot more imunder control with also the frontier labs more warning of "what happens when Mythos-class model get in the hands of everyone" than that actually becoming reality. Now, it appears to be actuually turning into reality.
I'd say, the single worst security news day for now
Can I get that in writing?
As we speak more slop is added to the pile, far more than can reasonably be reviewed and a lot of that code will be insecure.
Coincidentally, there is also a (non-embargoed) musl libc CVE published today involving integer overflow in its regex compiler: https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2026/10/21/1
Perhaps that is the underlying bug, or a similar one turned up by the same security research?
GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression. (...)
CVSS 10.0 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H)
Here, CVSS 10.0 means arbitrary remote code execution.
Might you perchance be exaggerating?
CVSS is like the Pitchfork Music ratings scale. It communicates false precision, and it's easy to point to places where that precision misleads (D-plan's "Emergency & I" is not better than every Yo La Tengo album).
For example if I cry wolf 50% of the time, but 100% of the times there's a wolf I cry wolf. Then no matter what the frequency of wolf sightings are, my crying wolf carries some information (unless there's always a wolf). Assume there's a wolf 1% of the nights, then I will cry wolf 50% of the time, and you only need to check for a wolf 50% of the nights rather than 100%.
It's worth noting that there's still technically signal even if I sometimes miss a wolf, even if you may choose to ignore that signal in order to pursue 100% accuracy yourself.
CVSS is good, it's better than nothing.
Any suggestions folks, not even my terminally online self can handle all of these.
But it's a lot better than having things live on the open internet!
Also looking at those old C++ services a whole lot differently now.