Coordinated Disclosure Timeline
- 2020-11-30: Issue reported to maintainers
- 2020-12-01: Report acknowledged
- 2021-02-28: Disclosure deadline reached
Summary
The metrics-workflow.yml GitHub workflow is vulnerable to unauthorized modification of the base repository or secrets exfiltration from a Pull Request.
Product
numworks/epsilon GitHub repository
Tested Version
The latest changeset 110f333 to the date.
Details
Issue: Untrusted code is explicitly checked out and run on a Pull Request from a fork
pull_request_target was introduced to allow triggered workflows to comment on PRs, label them, assign people, etc.. In order to make it possible the triggered action runner has read/write token for the base repository and the access to secrets. In order to prevent untrusted code from execution it runs in a context of the base repository.
By explicitly checking out and running build script from a fork the untrusted code is running in an environment that is able to push to the base repository and to access secrets.
on: [pull_request_target]
...
- name: Checkout PR head
uses: actions/checkout@v2
with:
ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }}
path: head
- name: Build head
run: make -j2 -C head epsilon.elf
...
Impact
The vulnerability allows for unauthorized modification of the base repository and secrets exfiltration.
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-2020-273 in any communication regarding this issue.