Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in GitHub Enterprise Server

CVE-2025-11578

What is CVE-2025-11578?

A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in GitHub Enterprise Server, enabling an authenticated Enterprise admin to gain unauthorized root SSH access. By leveraging a symlink escape within pre-receive hook environments, an attacker can manipulate a crafted repository to replace essential system binaries. This allows for the execution of a malicious payload, which adds the attacker's SSH key to the root user's authorized keys, thus obtaining root-level access to the server. The vulnerability requires enterprise admin privileges to exploit and affects all versions prior to 3.19. It has been addressed in specific versions ranging from 3.14.19 to 3.18.1 through security updates.

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