Background-job denial of service via unbounded references
Published Sep 12, 2025 · Updated Sep 12, 2025
Resource exhaustion in affected GitLab CE/EE releases allows remote authenticated users to stall background job processing with crafted text. Gitlab::ReferenceExtractor and Mentionable#all_references resolve an unbounded number of issue, merge-request, and commit references, causing Sidekiq workers to exhaust memory and be killed. Creating a commit, merge-request description, or note requires an authenticated account; successful exploitation halts CI, notifications, and other queued work until workers recover.
Summary
What happened
Resource exhaustion in affected GitLab CE/EE releases allows remote authenticated users to stall background job processing with crafted text. Gitlab::ReferenceExtractor and Mentionable#all_references resolve an unbounded number of issue, merge-request, and commit references, causing Sidekiq workers to exhaust memory and be killed. Creating a commit, merge-request description, or note requires an authenticated account; successful exploitation halts CI, notifications, and other queued work until workers recover.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2025-1250
- Published
- Sep 12, 2025
- Updated
- Sep 12, 2025
- Vendor
- GitLab
- Product
- GitLab
- Classifications
- CWE-770, T1499
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- authenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Sep 12, 2025CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Sep 12, 2025Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=15.0 <18.1.6
- Affected versionversion=18.2 <18.2.6
- Affected versionversion=18.3 <18.3.2
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
- Bulk issue-reference resource-exhaustion reproductionproof of concept · 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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