CVE-2026-79960 Gitea deploy key pushes acting as the repository owner

What is CVE-2026-79960?

CVE-2026-79960 is a high-severity vulnerability in Gitea Gitea, published on 6 Oct 2026. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

When a push was authenticated with a deploy key, Gitea recorded the repository owner as the pusher, so permission checks in the push hook pipeline evaluated the owner instead of the deploy key. A holder of a writable deploy key could create protected tags without being on the tag allow list and change repository visibility through push options, for example making a private repository public. Pull requests created through the AGit flow with a deploy key were also attributed to the owner.

Weakness: CWE-863

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-79960?

1 open source package ship an affected version, including gitea. It affects 1 product.

Products include Gitea Gitea.

How do I fix CVE-2026-79960?

Upgrade gitea to 28.0.0 or later.

Is CVE-2026-79960 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-79960 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Gitea Gitea

• CVE-2026-60004 Gitea Code Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2026-73278 Gitea WebAuthn bypass during OAuth and OIDC sign-in Critical 9.8
• CVE-2026-94205 Gitea fork workflow approval bypass through maintainer-triggered events Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-42968 Gitea vulnerable to Argument Injection Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-45330 Improper Privilege Management in Gitea Critical 9.8

All Gitea Gitea vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BIT-gitea-2026-79960, GHSA-7769-9pr9-m24h, MINI-6vrp-8c3h-g2cr, MINI-92qv-w6pc-v7p8.