Coordinated Disclosure Timeline

• 2020-11-30: Report sent to maintainer
• 2020-12-01: Issue partially resolved
• 2021-03-01: Disclosure deadline reached

Summary

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

Product

s4u/pgpverify-maven-plugin GitHub repository

Tested Version

The latest changeset 87aa1b4 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:
    branches:
      - 'master'
...
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          ref: 'refs/pull/${{ github.event.number }}/merge'
...
      - run: mvn verify

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 [email protected], please include a reference to GHSL-2020-314 in any communication regarding this issue.