CVE-2026-96580 Gitea Actions memory exhaustion through large static matrices

What is CVE-2026-96580?

CVE-2026-96580 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Gitea Gitea, published on 6 Oct 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Gitea expanded a workflow's static `strategy.matrix` into its full Cartesian product without a size limit when creating a run, before the fork pull request approval gate applied. A user who can open a pull request from a fork could submit a small workflow file whose matrix expands to a very large number of jobs, consuming server memory and potentially terminating the Gitea process. No runner is required. Static matrices above 256 combinations are now rejected before expansion.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-96580?

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

Products include Gitea Gitea.

How do I fix CVE-2026-96580?

Upgrade gitea to 28.0.0 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2026-96580 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-96580 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-2026-96580, GHSA-p3rv-cr5f-9gjh, MINI-f5g5-w7fp-98vj, MINI-p27m-g487-hp2x.