Presented at
DEF CON 32 (2024),
Aug. 10, 2024, noon
(45 minutes).
GitHub Actions is quickly becoming the de facto CI/CD provider for open-source projects, startups, and enterprises. At the same time, GitHub’s security model is full of insecure defaults. This makes it easy for their customers to expose themselves to critical attacks from the public internet. The end result? A systemic vulnerability class that won’t go away.
During our research, we identified GitHub Actions misconfigurations at scale that would allow threat actors to backdoor major open-source projects. An example of this is our attack on PyTorch, a prominent ML framework used by companies and researchers around the world.
Through this attack, we could contribute code directly to the main branch of the PyTorch repository, upload malicious releases, backdoor other PyTorch projects, and more. These attacks began by compromising self-hosted runners, which are machines that execute jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow. From there, we leveraged misconfigurations and GitHub “features” to elevate our privileges within GitHub Actions workflows.
Our research campaign included dozens of reports, over $250,000 in bug bounties, and endless war stories. Tune in for a deep dive into the TTPs that allow turning a trivial runner compromise into a full supply chain attack.
1. [link](https://adnanthekhan.com/2023/12/20/one-supply-chain-attack-to-rule-them-all/)
2. [link](https://johnstawinski.com/2024/01/11/playing-with-fire-how-we-executed-a-critical-supply-chain-attack-on-pytorch/)
3. [link](https://johnstawinski.com/2024/01/05/worse-than-solarwinds-three-steps-to-hack-blockchains-github-and-ml-through-github-actions/)
Presenters:
-
Adnan Khan
- Red Team Security Engineer
Adnan is a Red Team Security Engineer and researcher who has recently been focusing on supply chain and CI/CD attacks. He has identified, demonstrated, and reported vulnerabilities impacting GitHub repositories belonging to organizations like Microsoft, Nvidia, GitHub, Google, and more. Additionally, he has spoken at conferences such as ShmooCon 2023 and BSides SF 2023 on the topic of GitHub Actions security.
-
John Stawinski
John is an offensive security engineer, vulnerability researcher, and writer, specializing in Red Team operations and CICD security. John established himself as a member of the broader security community in 2023 through a series of CI/CD attacks on prominent open-source repositories. Embracing a nomadic lifestyle, John thrives on adventure sports and welcomes new experiences.
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