CVE-2026-96589 Gitea private repository access retained after rejected transfer

What is CVE-2026-96589?

CVE-2026-96589 is a medium-severity missing authorization 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 private repository is transferred to a user who lacks access, Gitea grants that recipient temporary read access as a collaborator so they can review the repository. Rejecting or cancelling the transfer did not revoke this collaboration, so the named recipient kept persistent read access to the private repository, including its code, issues, pull requests and wiki, and could clone it. The repository owner was not notified. Transfer-granted access is now removed while collaborations that existed before the transfer are preserved.

Weakness: CWE-863, CWE-672

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-96589?

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

Products include Gitea Gitea.

How do I fix CVE-2026-96589?

Upgrade gitea to 28.0.0 or later.

Upgrade, and check permissions on every request on the server, not only in the interface. More about Missing authorization.

Is CVE-2026-96589 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-96589 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-2026-96589, GHSA-xfqq-h54g-92f8, MINI-g8q3-v62p-cp98, MINI-hqr4-5cgc-3h97.