Gitea: Fork workflow approval bypass through pull request review events
Summary
Gitea does not attach the pull request to Actions notifications for review comment, approval and rejection events. As a result, the approval gate for fork pull request workflows does not apply, and workflow code from the fork head runs on the base repository's runners without maintainer approval. An attacker with a low-privileged account that can trigger review events can execute fork-controlled code across the intended approval boundary, potentially exposing secrets and tokens.
Affected
- Gitea 1.20.0 to 1.27.1 (per CNA record; lower bound to be verified against the vendor advisory)
Fixed in
- Gitea 1.27.3 (fixed via pull requests #39005 and #39018)
Workaround
Unknown.
Exploitation
- No known exploitation at the time of research.
- CISA SSVC: Exploitation none, Automatable no, Technical Impact total.
- No public proof of concept found; the searches were not exhaustive.
Our recommendation
- Upgrade Gitea to 1.27.3 or later as soon as possible.
- Until patched, restrict who can submit reviews or comments on pull requests and require approval for Actions runs from outside contributors.
- Limit which runners can execute jobs of the base repository, especially self-hosted runners.
- Review secrets available to Actions workflows and rotate them if misuse is suspected.
Public exploits
PoC-in-GitHub, Metasploit and Exploit-DB list nothing for this CVE.
Research sources
- Gitea 1.27.3 is released blog.gitea.com
- Pull Request #39005: fix(actions): enforce fork pull request trust boundaries github.com
- Pull Request #39018 github.com
- Gitea v1.27.3 release github.com
- GHSA-7w2r-xwp6-mh6c github.com
- OSV: CVE-2026-71184 osv.dev
Researched and written up in English and German by an AI (Claude by Anthropic) based on NVD, CISA, EPSS and the sources listed. The vendor information is authoritative. Researched on 31 Oct 2026, 16:51.
Original description (NVD)
Gitea's pull request review notifier does not attach the pull request to the Actions notification, so the fork workflow approval gate does not recognize the run as originating from a fork. Review comment and review approval or rejection events can consequently load workflow code from the fork head and run it on the base repository's runners without the required maintainer approval. This allows execution of fork-controlled workflow code across the intended approval boundary.
Sources
The tracker combines official, freely usable data sources – updated continuously:
- NVD (NIST) – CVEs, rating (CVSS), affected products
- CISA KEV – vulnerabilities confirmed by CISA as actively exploited
- CISA Vulnrichment – CISA assessment (SSVC) in the official CVE record
- FIRST EPSS – probability of exploitation
- Microsoft MSRC – Patch Tuesday: vulnerabilities, severity, updates
- PoC-in-GitHub – public proof-of-concept repositories
- Metasploit (Rapid7) – modules of the Metasploit Framework
- Exploit-DB (OffSec) – archive of public exploits (links only)
- Patch days: official vendor pages (linked per vendor) (Vendor patch days)
This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. EPSS data © FIRST.org.
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