CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-11578

HighCVSS 7.2
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Elevated risk
0.66%

50th percentile - higher than 50% of all known CVEs

Summary

A privilege escalation vulnerability was identified in GitHub Enterprise Server that allowed an authenticated Enterprise admin to gain root SSH access to the appliance by exploiting a symlink escape in pre-receive hook environments. By crafting a malicious repository and environment, an attacker could replace system binaries during hook cleanup and execute a payload that adds their own SSH key to the root user's authorized keys. This vulnerability affected all versions prior to 3.19 and was fixed in versions 3.14.20, 3.15.15, 3.16.11, 3.17.8, 3.18.2.

Risk Assessment

An Enterprise admin can take full control of the GitHub Enterprise Server by gaining root SSH access, leading to complete compromise of repository and system confidentiality and integrity.

Recommendation

Upgrade GitHub Enterprise Server to one of the fixed versions: 3.14.20, 3.15.15, 3.16.11, 3.17.8, or 3.18.2. Limit the number of accounts with Enterprise admin privileges to the necessary minimum.

Other vulnerabilities in GitHub Enterprise Server

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

A privilege escalation vulnerability was identified in GitHub Enterprise Server that allowed an authenticated Enterprise admin to gain root SSH access to the appliance by exploiting a symlink escape in pre-receive hook environments. By crafting a malicious repository and environment, an attacker could replace system binaries during hook cleanup and execute a payload that adds their own SSH key to the root user’s authorized keys—thereby granting themselves root SSH access to the server. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needed to have enterprise admin privileges. This vulnerability affected all versions of GitHub Enterprise Server prior to 3.19, and was fixed in versions 3.14.20, 3.15.15, 3.16.11, 3.17.8, 3.18.2. This vulnerability was reported via the GitHub Bug Bounty program.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS