CVE-2026-15996

Summary

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.

Impact & exploitability

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products we track (1)

Recommendation

Apply the vendor fix promptly. Open any affected product above for its exact safe version.

Additional information

• NVD record
• https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.17/admin/release-notes#3.17.16
• https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.18/admin/release-notes#3.18.10
• https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.19/admin/release-notes#3.19.7
• https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.20/admin/release-notes#3.20.3