CVE-2026-15996 PUBLISHED

Denial of service vulnerability in GitHub Enterprise Server allowed unauthenticated service disruption via deeply nested request parameters

Assigner: GitHub_P
Reserved: 16.07.2026 Published: 05.08.2026 Updated: 06.08.2026

A denial of service vulnerability was identified in GitHub Enterprise Server that allowed an unauthenticated attacker to cause excessive CPU consumption and exhaust the pool of request-handling worker processes by sending a crafted form-encoded HTTP POST request containing deeply nested parameters. Because request parameters were parsed before routing and authentication, any POST endpoint could be used to trigger the condition, which could render the instance unresponsive. This vulnerability affected all versions of GitHub Enterprise Server prior to 3.21 and was fixed in versions 3.20.3, 3.19.7, 3.18.10, and 3.17.16.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U
CVSS Score: 6.6

Product Status

Vendor GitHub
Product Enterprise Server
Versions Default: affected
  • affected from 3.17.0 to 3.17.15 (incl.)
  • affected from 3.18.0 to 3.18.9 (incl.)
  • affected from 3.19.0 to 3.19.6 (incl.)
  • affected from 3.20.0 to 3.20.2 (incl.)

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation