Coordinated Disclosure Timeline

• 2020-11-30: Issue reported to the maintainer.
• 2020-11-30-2021-02-23: Attempted to contact maintainers multiple times.
• 2021-02-28: Disclosure deadline reached.
• 2021-03-02: Public issue created.
• 2021-12-29: Maintainer replies that the workflow has been disabled.

Summary

The auto_merge.yml GitHub workflow is vulnerable to unauthorized modification of the base repository or secrets exfiltration from a Pull Request.

Product

BitByte-TPC/first-bit GitHub repository

Tested Version

The latest changeset a43fb3c 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:
    paths:
    - 'public/directory/**.json'
...
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        ref: ${{github.event.pull_request.head.ref}}
        repository: ${{github.event.pull_request.head.repo.full_name}}
    
    - name: Yarn install
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
    - run: yarn install

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-2020-313 in any communication regarding this issue.