Responsible disclosure: improper access control in Gitlab private project.

As I said back in September with regard to a responsible disclosure about Facebook, data access control isn’t easy. While it can sound quite simple (just give access to the authorized entities), it is very difficult, both on a theoretical side (who is an authorized entity? What does authorized mean? And how do we identify an entity?) and on a practical side.

Author's pictureApr 19, 2019 | Riccardo Padovani | [email protected]

This issue was firstly reported on HackerOne and was managed on the Gitlab issues’ tracker. Both links are now publicly accessible.

Summary of the issue

The second step could happen for a lot of different reasons:

When an admin removes a user from a private group, there is no indication that the user still has access to private projects, if their role was changed.

Impact

User can still see all resources of a project of a secret group after they have been removed from the parent’s group.

Timeline

Bounty

Gitlab awarded me a $2000 bounty award for the disclosure.

If you follow my blog, you know I deeply love Gitlab: I contribute to it, I write blog posts, and I advocate for it any time I can. Still, I think this experience was awful, to say the least. There was a total lack of communication by their side, they thought they fixed the issue the first time, but actually, it wasn’t fixed. If they had communicated with me, I would have double checked their work. After that, they deployed the fix and went public, without telling me. I was not interested in the bounty (for which I am grateful), I reported the issue because I care about Gitlab. Nonetheless, my love for Gitlab is still the same! I just hope they will improve this part of communication / contributing to Gitlab: in the last couple of years the community around the project grew a lot, and they are doing amazing with it, maybe the Community team should step in and help also the security community?

For any comment, feedback, critic, leave a comment below, or drop an email at [email protected].

Regards,
R.

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