Prometheus denial of service via unrestricted PromQL
Published Jan 12, 2023 · Updated Apr 8, 2025
Denial of service in GitLab CE/EE before 15.5.7, 15.6 through 15.6.3, and 15.7 through 15.7.1 allows remote attackers to hang Prometheus. The public-project Grafana proxy accepts arbitrary PromQL and forwards concurrent, cache-busted queries through an administrative Grafana data source without limiting query complexity. A public project with a configured Grafana integration is enough; repeated expensive range queries can pin all CPU cores and leave Prometheus unresponsive.
Summary
What happened
Denial of service in GitLab CE/EE before 15.5.7, 15.6 through 15.6.3, and 15.7 through 15.7.1 allows remote attackers to hang Prometheus. The public-project Grafana proxy accepts arbitrary PromQL and forwards concurrent, cache-busted queries through an administrative Grafana data source without limiting query complexity. A public project with a configured Grafana integration is enough; repeated expensive range queries can pin all CPU cores and leave Prometheus unresponsive.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2022-3613
- Published
- Jan 12, 2023
- Updated
- Apr 8, 2025
- Vendor
- GitLab
- Product
- GitLab
- Classifications
- CWE-400, T1499.003
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jan 12, 2023CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Apr 8, 2025Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
Compare your product and version with the public record. A matching version still requires validation against your environment.
Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=>=0.0, <15.5.7
- Affected versionversion=>=15.6, <15.6.4
- Affected versionversion=>=15.7, <15.7.2
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
CVSS describes severity. EPSS estimates exploitation probability.
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
- GitLab issue reproduction for crafted PromQL exhaustionfunctional · demonstrated
Labels summarize the accepted research assessment. They do not indicate a test against your environment.
Technologies
Your stack
See the directory against your own environment.
Your stack
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