Resource exhaustion in GitHub Enterprise Server
CVE-2026-7541
A denial of service vulnerability was identified in GitHub Enterprise Server that allowed an unauthenticated attacker to cause service disruption by sending crafted requests with deeply nested JSON payloads to an unauthenticated API endpoint. The endpoint parsed user-controlled JSON request bodies without size or depth limits, causing excessive CPU and memory consumption. This vulnerability affected all versions of GitHub Enterprise Server prior to 3.21 and was fixed in versions 3.20.2, 3.19.6, 3.18.9, 3.17.15, and 3.16.18. This vulnerability was reported via the GitHub Bug Bounty program.
Published · last modified .
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.
EPSS exploit prediction
EPSS: 0.007 (49.5th percentile), scored .
Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 49th percentile — 49.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.
EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.004 · newest: 0.007 · change: +0.003
Affected products
- GitHub Enterprise Server — versions 3.16.0, 3.17.0, 3.18.0
- GitHub Enterprise Server
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
- docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.16/admin/release-notes (release-notes, Release Notes, Vendor Advisory)
- docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.17/admin/release-notes (release-notes, Release Notes, Vendor Advisory)
- docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.18/admin/release-notes (release-notes, Release Notes, Vendor Advisory)
- docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.19/admin/release-notes (release-notes, Release Notes, Vendor Advisory)
- docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.20/admin/release-notes (release-notes, Release Notes, Vendor Advisory)
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2026-7541?
- CVE-2026-7541 is a high-severity vulnerability in GitHub Enterprise Server, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2026-05-07.
- How severe is CVE-2026-7541?
- High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.