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Use GitHub actions at your own risk

julienrenaux.fr

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#21

This also applies to most library, docker (as mentioned) and basically anything you use that's 3rd party. I suppose it varies on your level of paranoia, though honestly if you rely on a github action in your production flow you should fork the project. Never mind doing something malicious, they could just as easily delete the entire repo and now your critical feature you needed to deliver are blocked because the libr…

Do you fork your own programming languages too?

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#22
post #17

Sorry, that whole github actions concept gives me the screaming heeby-jeebies. We're really not even pulling the dependency locally, we're just going to run someone else's code from their repo, on github's server, with our data and secrets? What could possibly go wrong with that? /s

This isn't much different than other CI/CD pipelines. Docker images come to mind.

This isn't much different than other SaaS CI/CD pipelines.

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't much different than other CI/CD pipelines. Docker images come to mind.

This isn't much different than other SaaS CI/CD pipelines.

Right, such as travis, circleci, gitlab, etc. All of which are pretty popular, so clearly there is interest in SaaS CI/CD.

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#24
post #21

This also applies to most library, docker (as mentioned) and basically anything you use that's 3rd party. I suppose it varies on your level of paranoia, though honestly if you rely on a github action in your production flow you should fork the project. Never mind doing something malicious, they could just as easily delete the entire repo and now your critical feature you needed to deliver are blocked because the libr…

Do you fork your own programming languages too?

Not so much a fork as a package cache - but usually for anything important, absolutely.

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#25

This also applies to most library, docker (as mentioned) and basically anything you use that's 3rd party. I suppose it varies on your level of paranoia, though honestly if you rely on a github action in your production flow you should fork the project. Never mind doing something malicious, they could just as easily delete the entire repo and now your critical feature you needed to deliver are blocked because the libr…

While I understand the "fork everything you use" policy, github should make this process easier. Even though it is "free", it pollutes one's account/profile with hundreds of packages that are not really 'forks' with independent or alternate functionality.

Many automated vendor/package management tools will not automate pulling newer changes from upstream. If this was instead a simple a read-only version/tag, it is easy for those tools to provide upgrade/update path.

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#26
post #21

This also applies to most library, docker (as mentioned) and basically anything you use that's 3rd party. I suppose it varies on your level of paranoia, though honestly if you rely on a github action in your production flow you should fork the project. Never mind doing something malicious, they could just as easily delete the entire repo and now your critical feature you needed to deliver are blocked because the libr…

Do you fork your own programming languages too?

We definitely standardize runtime and compiler versions across runtime environments and build servers and have planned upgrade paths with rollback options.

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely true, but given the sensitivity of having access to private source and secrets I think its fair to call out a warning.

couldn't a malicious docker image also be tooled to dump all of that stuff to an external destination?

Absolutely. CI systems tend to get broad access to everything sacred. Giving that level of access to community code is risky in the least.

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#29
post #25

This also applies to most library, docker (as mentioned) and basically anything you use that's 3rd party. I suppose it varies on your level of paranoia, though honestly if you rely on a github action in your production flow you should fork the project. Never mind doing something malicious, they could just as easily delete the entire repo and now your critical feature you needed to deliver are blocked because the libr…

While I understand the "fork everything you use" policy, github should make this process easier. Even though it is "free", it pollutes one's account/profile with hundreds of packages that are not really 'forks' with independent or alternate functionality. Many automated vendor/package management tools will not automate pulling newer changes from upstream. If this was instead a simple a read-only version/tag, it is ea…

A reasonably good solution to mitigate the “profile pollution” is to create a Github organization for these kinds of forks (I use -forks)

Re: Use GitHub actions at your own risk

#30
I think GitHub is making it extremely easy to make this mistake by making the Actions Marketplace so easily accessible when you're editing a workflow in their UI. This is horrible design. They should at least point out the real consequences of pulling in these other actions and letting you fork right there.

I mean, there is an action in the marketplace that runs git-crypt to decrypt your files. With this issue, no user should ever be using this action without forking it to their repo first.

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