CVE-2025-59531
Description
A denial of service vulnerability was identified in the Argo CD continuous delivery tool, which is distributed as part of Red Hat GitOps product. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this flaw by sending a specially crafted request to the Application Programming Interface (API) webhook endpoint. This action causes the API server to crash, preventing it from restarting properly. By repeatedly targeting the server, an attacker can cause a complete service outage, making the Argo CD interface unavailable to all users. This vulnerability is only exposed in configurations where a specific webhook secret has not been set.
Statement
This vulnerability was rated as Important by the Red Hat Product Security team, this happens because an unauthenticated attacker is able to cause a denial of service from the whole GitOps cluster. This vulnerability affects only clusters without a configured 'webhook.bitbucket.secret' configuration key, thus clusters that have this option configured are not exposed to this flaw.
This vulnerability lies in a unsafe cast when trying to retrieve the repository.links.cloneJSON field from BitBucket-Server push request. When the unsafe cast is triggered, the goroutine created by the worker to process the request will fail within an assertion panic and, as it lacks a recovery routine, the whole argocd-server binary will be terminated. If an attacker manages to force all the argocd-server replica nodes to reach this assertion failure, a Denial of Service of the whole cluster will happen.
Mitigation
If a BitBucket repository is being used by GitOps it's possible to mitigate this vulnerability by setting up a BitBucket webhook secret to ensure only trusted parties can access the webhook endpoint.
In case BitBucket is not being used, the user can set the webhook secret to a long random value to prevent the webhook from being called:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: argocd-secret
type: Opaque
data:
+ webhook.bitbucketserver.secret: <your base64-encoded secret here>
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 7.5 | N/A | N/A |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | N/A |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | N/A |
| Privileges Required | None | N/A | N/A |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | N/A |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | N/A |
| Confidentiality | None | N/A | N/A |
| Integrity Impact | None | N/A | N/A |
| Availability Impact | High | N/A | N/A |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Availability,Confidentiality
Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; Read Application Data
An uncaught exception could cause the system to be placed in a state that could lead to a crash, exposure of sensitive information or other unintended behaviors.
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