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"
}