CVE-2024-2829 is a high-severity vulnerability affecting GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) versions starting from 12.5 up to versions prior to 16.9.6, as well as versions starting from 16.10 up to before 16.10.4, and versions starting from 16.11 up to before 16.11.1. The vulnerability arises from inefficient regular expression complexity in the FileFinder component of GitLab, specifically related to the handling of crafted wildcard filters. This inefficiency can be exploited to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition by triggering excessive CPU consumption or resource exhaustion when processing maliciously crafted input. The vulnerability is categorized under CWE-1333, which pertains to inefficient regular expression complexity leading to performance degradation. The CVSS v3.1 base score is 7.5 (high), with the vector indicating that the attack can be performed remotely (AV:N), with low attack complexity (AC:L), no privileges required (PR:N), no user interaction needed (UI:N), and impacts availability only (A:H) without affecting confidentiality or integrity. No known exploits are currently reported in the wild, but the vulnerability's characteristics make it a viable target for denial of service attacks against GitLab instances exposed to untrusted users or networks. Since GitLab is widely used for source code management, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps workflows, exploitation could disrupt development operations and continuous integration processes.

For European organizations, the impact of this vulnerability can be significant, especially for enterprises, public sector entities, and technology companies relying heavily on GitLab for software development and deployment. A successful DoS attack could lead to prolonged service outages, halting development pipelines, delaying software releases, and potentially causing operational disruptions. This could affect productivity and lead to financial losses. Additionally, organizations providing GitLab as a service or hosting GitLab instances for clients could face reputational damage and contractual penalties due to service unavailability. Since the vulnerability does not compromise confidentiality or integrity, the primary concern is availability, which is critical in continuous integration and deployment environments. The risk is heightened for GitLab instances accessible over the internet or within large corporate networks where malicious actors or insiders could exploit the vulnerability without authentication or user interaction.

To mitigate this vulnerability, European organizations should promptly upgrade affected GitLab instances to the fixed versions: 16.9.6 or later for the 16.9 branch, 16.10.4 or later for the 16.10 branch, and 16.11.1 or later for the 16.11 branch. If immediate upgrading is not feasible, organizations should restrict access to GitLab's FileFinder functionality by limiting network exposure, implementing strict firewall rules, and enforcing IP whitelisting to trusted users only. Monitoring and rate-limiting requests that involve wildcard filters or FileFinder usage can help detect and block potential exploitation attempts. Additionally, organizations should audit their GitLab usage patterns to identify any unusual spikes in resource consumption that could indicate exploitation attempts. Employing Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) with custom rules to detect and block suspicious regex patterns or malformed requests targeting FileFinder may provide an additional layer of defense. Finally, maintaining regular backups and incident response plans will help minimize operational impact in case of an attack.