Introduction
Service interruptions on GitLab can halt development pipelines and disrupt entire engineering teams. The recent denial of service vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-10497 highlights how unauthenticated attackers could have rendered GitLab instances unavailable by targeting the event collection system. This brief summary covers technical details, affected versions, patch information, and vendor security history for security professionals evaluating their exposure.
Technical Information
CVE-2025-10497 is a denial of service vulnerability in GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The flaw exists in the event collection subsystem, which is responsible for tracking user and system events within GitLab. The vulnerability is categorized under CWE-770 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling).
The root cause is insufficient validation of incoming payloads to the event collection endpoint. An unauthenticated attacker can send specially crafted payloads that trigger excessive resource allocation. This can exhaust memory, CPU, or other system resources, resulting in a denial of service condition. The attack requires no authentication or user interaction and can be performed remotely over the network. The impact is limited to service availability; there is no indication of data confidentiality or integrity compromise.
No public code snippets, detailed payload structures, or proof of concept exploit methods have been disclosed as of the publication date.
Patch Information
In the latest GitLab patch release (versions 18.5.1, 18.4.3, and 18.3.5), several critical security vulnerabilities have been addressed to enhance the platform's robustness.
Denial of Service in Event Collection
Unauthenticated users could previously send specially crafted payloads to the event collection system, leading to a denial of service. The update implements enhanced validation and rate limiting to prevent such payloads from causing service disruptions.
Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions to benefit from these security improvements.
Patch source: GitLab 18.5.1 Patch Release
Affected Systems and Versions
- GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE)
- Versions from 17.10 before 18.3.5
- Versions 18.4 before 18.4.3
- Versions 18.5 before 18.5.1
Any self-managed GitLab instance running these versions is vulnerable. GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated are already patched.
Vendor Security History
GitLab has previously addressed denial of service vulnerabilities in its platform, including issues related to resource exhaustion and input validation. The vendor operates an active bug bounty program and typically releases patches promptly for critical vulnerabilities. The patch for CVE-2025-10497 was released within days of disclosure, reflecting a mature security response process.
