Coordinated Disclosure Timeline

• 2021-01-18: Issue reported to maintainers
• 2021-02-23: Issue fixed

Summary

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

Product

actions-cool/issues-helper GitHub repository

Tested Version

The latest changeset surge-preview.yml to the date.

Details

Issue: Untrusted code is explicitly checked out and run on a Pull Request from a fork

Workflows triggered on pull_request_target have read/write tokens for the base repository and the access to secrets. By explicitly checking out and running the 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. More details can be found in the article Keeping your GitHub Actions and workflows secure: Preventing pwn requests.

on: pull_request_target
...
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          ref: refs/pull/${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}/merge
      - uses: afc163/surge-preview@v1
        with:
          surge_token: ${{ secrets.SURGE_TOKEN }}
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          build: |
            yarn
            yarn docs-dev:build
          dist: docs-dist
          teardown: 'true'
...

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-2021-008 in any communication regarding this issue.