GHSA-w5pg-649r-p6gg

Summary

Gitea does not re-evaluate the official flag on existing pull request reviews when a PR's target branch is changed. An attacker with write access to a repository can obtain an official: true approval on a PR targeting an unprotected branch, then retarget the PR to a protected branch (e.g., master). The approval, which would have been official: false if submitted against the protected branch, is preserved and satisfies the protected branch's required approvals, allowing the attacker to merge without legitimate maintainer approval.

• Confirmed on Gitea 1.25.4 (1.25.4+41-g96515c0f20)

Vulnerability Details

Root Cause

When a review is submitted on a pull request, Gitea computes the official flag by checking whether the reviewer is in the target branch's approval whitelist (IsUserOfficialReviewer in models/git/protected_branch.go). This flag is stored in the database as a boolean on the review record.

When a PR's target branch is subsequently changed via ChangeTargetBranch (services/pull/pull.go:218), the function:

• Updates pr.BaseBranch
• Recalculates merge feasibility and divergence
• Deletes old push comments
• Creates a "change target branch" comment

But it does not:

• Re-evaluate official on existing reviews
• Dismiss existing approvals
• Check whether reviewers are in the new target branch's approval whitelist

At merge time, GetGrantedApprovalsCount (models/issues/pull.go:766) counts reviews where official = true AND dismissed = false AND type = Approve. It reads the stored boolean — it does not re-check the whitelist. The stale official: true from the unprotected branch satisfies the protected branch's approval requirement.

Relevant Code Paths

1. Review creation — services/pull/review.go:SubmitReview calls IsOfficialReviewer against the current pr.BaseBranch's protection rules, stores official=true/false
2. Target branch change — services/pull/pull.go:ChangeTargetBranch...