What happened
CISA added CVE-2026-97229 to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-10-29 with confirmed in-the-wild exploitation. It is an integer overflow in GitLab's CI/CD regular-expression compiler that lets an unauthenticated attacker run arbitrary code; the same regex engine produced a sibling CVSS-10 RCE (CVE-2026-110264) days later. The vulnerable path has been present since GitLab 7.0.
Why it matters
GitLab is the control plane for much of the AI software supply chain — model/source repos, CI/CD that trains and deploys models, and increasingly MCP-server integrations. Confirmed in-the-wild unauthenticated RCE here gives an attacker code execution on the very host that stores AI repo secrets, model artifacts and deploy credentials.
Attack vector
An unauthenticated user supplies a specially crafted regular expression (e.g. in CI/CD config) that causes an integer overflow in the Ruby/Onigmo regex compiler while it builds the pattern bytecode. The wrap-around corrupts memory in a way that can be steered into arbitrary code execution before any input is matched; Regexp.timeout does not protect against it.
Affected systems
GitLab CE/EE — integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression in CI/CD configuration (CVSS 10.0). Fixed in the patch-release set for 18.11/19.0/19.1/19.2/19.3/19.4/19.5 (e.g. 19.4.3, 19.3.6, 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, 18.11.13).
Mitigation
Patch immediately to a fixed release (self-managed instances only; GitLab.com is already fixed). CISA lists this in KEV with a federal due date of 2026-11-01.