CVE-2026-85706 PoC — Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') in GitLab

Source

https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/blob/main/http/cves/2026/CVE-2026-85706.yaml

Associated Vulnerability

Title: Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') in GitLab (CVE-2026-85706)
Description:GitLab has remediated an issue in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 18.7 before 18.11.12, 19.0 before 19.0.9, 19.1 before 19.1.8, 19.2 before 19.2.6, and 19.3 before 19.3.2 that, under certain conditions, an unauthenticated user could have read arbitrary files from the GitLab server due to improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API.

Description

GitLab CE/EE contains an unauthenticated arbitrary file read. Workhorse, the reverse proxy in front of Rails, matches upload routes using EscapedPath() and path.Clean without decoding percent sequences, while Puma decodes them before routing to Grape. Appending a trailing slash to commits or percent-encoding a static path segment as %63ommits therefore bypasses Workhorse upload route rewriting, and Rails reaches file_params_from_body_upload() which opens the path given in the file.path parameter before authenticate! is enforced. On the application/x-www-form-urlencoded branch the file bytes are handed to Rack::Utils.parse_nested_query, and any invalid percent sequence raises an ArgumentError whose message is interpolated into the HTTP 400 response body, disclosing file content to an unauthenticated caller.

File Snapshot

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