CISA Warns of Critical GitLab Path Traversal Flaw Exploited to Read Arbitrary Server Files

The U. S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a critical GitLab path traversa l vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85706, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after evidence that the flaw is being actively exploited.

The vulnerability affects both GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). CVE-2026-85706 allows an unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from a vulnerable GitLab server.

The issue stems from improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API, allowing attacker-controlled path values to escape the intended repository directory.

CISA Warns of Critical GitLab Path Traversal Flaw

The flaw is categorized as CWE-35, a path traversal weakness that occurs when an application fails to properly restrict file-path operations to an expected directory.