Coordinated Disclosure Timeline

• 2020-11-30: Report sent to maintainer.
• 2021-01-23: Issue resolved.

Summary

The design and promoted usage examples of afc163/surge-preview GitHub action makes the consuming workflows vulnerable to arbitrary code execution. The repository of afc163/surge-preview GitHub action falls into the same trap and is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution.

Product

afc163/surge-preview action and GitHub repository

Tested Version

The latest changeset 33b194b to the date.

Details

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.

Issue 1: afc163/surge-preview GitHub action is designed to run potentially untrusted code from a Pull Request on pull_request_target

Below is an excerpt from an example of usage in the documentation:

on: pull_request_target
...
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          ref: refs/pull/${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}/merge
      - uses: afc163/surge-preview@v1
        id: preview_step
        with:
          surge_token: ${{ secrets.SURGE_TOKEN }}
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          dist: public
          build: |
            npm install
            npm run build
...

Since the action needs the SURGE_TOKEN for functioning and worklows triggered on pull_request do not have the access to secrets it promotes using pull_request_target and explicitly checking out the code from the Pull Request. One of the action's arguments is a build script that instructs the action how to build the source. If the argument is not provided it uses npm install & npm run build by default:

...
  build:
    description: 'build scripts'
    default: |
      npm install
      npm run build
    required: false
...

A potentially untrusted Pull Request may execute an arbitrary script in a workflow that has read/write repository access and potentially can access secrets.

Impact

The vulnerability allows for unauthorized modification of the using repository and secrets exfiltration.

Issue 2: Untrusted code is explicitly checked out and run on a Pull Request from a fork

The action's repositry itself has a Pull Request workflow:

  pull_request_target:
    # use default types + closed event type
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened, closed]
...
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          ref: refs/pull/${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}/merge
      - uses: ./
        id: preview_step
        name: test afc163/surge-preview
        with:
          surge_token: ${{ secrets.SURGE_TOKEN }}
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          teardown: 'true'
          dist: public/preview
          build: |
            mkdir -p public/preview
            npm install
            npm run build-preview -- public/preview
...

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-2020-266 in any communication regarding this issue.