Question

How to secure your GitLab instance from CVE-2021-22205?

We love that you have chosen to host your source code repo on DigitalOcean. We know how important it is to have organized and up-to-date code for your projects and products. But it’s also important to keep that source-code repo infrastructure up-to-date to avoid potential attacks!


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
November 5, 2021
Accepted Answer

In April 2021, GitLab disclosed CVE-2021-22205 detailing a trivial Remote Code Execution vulnerability. “Trivial” meaning that it is both (1) easy to execute and (2) can be done by unauthenticated users. On November 1st, this vulnerability was found being actively exploited in the wild, including DigitalOcean customers. We strongly encourage you to:

Stay up to date with the latest releases to ensure security vulnerabilities are patched. GitLab publishes upgrade instructions for a variety of deployment methodologies here: https://about.gitlab.com/update/.

Follow GitLab’s best practices for securing your environment: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/20/gitlab-instance-security-best-practices/.

Ensure you are signed up to receive notifications from GitLab about important security release updates. Visit https://about.gitlab.com/company/contact/ and fill out the form under “Sign up for Security notices.” For those who love RSS feeds: https://about.gitlab.com/security-releases.xml

Patching and downtime can be disruptive to your workflow, however, to protect your project/product, your Droplet, other DigitalOcean customers, and the broader internet community please ensure your infrastructure is up to date!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel