Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-3205

Gitlab 15.11 – 16.1.5

Published
01 September 2023
Modified
05 May 2025
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 6.5
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0070 51th percentile
Risk Priority 52 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2023-3205 is a medium-severity Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity (CWE-1333) vulnerability in Gitlab Gitlab. Its CVSS base score is 6.5 (Medium).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Endpoint Denial of Service (T1499); ranked in the top 49% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

An issue has been discovered in GitLab affecting all versions starting from 15.11 before 16.1.5, all versions starting from 16.2 before 16.2.5, all versions starting from 16.3 before 16.3.1. An authenticated user could trigger a denial of service when importing…

more

or cloning malicious content.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1499 Endpoint Denial of Service Impact
Adversaries may perform Endpoint Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to degrade or block the availability of services to users.
T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood Impact
Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2024-3114Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2025-2937Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2023-3364Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2024-4025Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2024-1963Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2024-2800Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2023-2132Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2023-3909Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2023-6682Same product: Gitlab Gitlab
CVE-2023-6678Same product: Gitlab Gitlab

Affected Assets

gitlab
gitlab
16.3.0 · 15.11 — 16.1.5 · 15.11 — 16.1.5 · 16.2 — 16.2.5

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

PR.PS-06 mostly match
prevents

Secure SDLC practices directly prevent inefficient regex via reviews, static analysis, and safe libraries.

ID.RA-01 partial match
prevents

Vulnerability identification processes can discover ReDoS issues in existing code but do not stop their introduction.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

finds

Security testing can detect and reject regex patterns with exponential worst-case complexity.

prevents

Secure development lifecycle mandates review of algorithmic efficiency, directly addressing ReDoS-prone regex.

prevents

Application security requirements can specify input-validation rules that limit regex complexity.

prevents

Secure architecture principles encourage avoidance of computationally expensive constructs such as catastrophic backtracking.

prevents

Secure coding standards explicitly prohibit or limit the use of inefficient regular expressions.

References