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A supply chain attack on PyTorch

johnstawinski.com

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#11

I know that it is zeitgeist exploiting to say this, but seeing Boeing listed and not Airbus really says something to me. Lockheed being listed makes me wonder if the FBI/CIA really will (further) step up on cybercrime, because you now have potential national security implications in a core supplier to multiple military branches.

Boeing is a lot more into military tech than airbus

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#12

very interesting i wonder about the over-dependence on third party packages and modules imagine the author of 'is-odd' injects a trojan there what are you gonna do? C has this solved but 'vendoring' is not as fast as this approach

You can't do much beyond setting up a corporate proxy that blocks or inspects outbound connections. Even then, you're relying on luck.

These days it's practically a necessity for companies to shell out money to some sort of supply-chain protection software (Sonatype, Socket.dev etc.)

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#13
The key to this attack is: "The result of these settings is that, by default, any repository contributor can execute code on the self-hosted runner by submitting a malicious PR."

Problem: you need to be a "contributor" to the repo for your PR to trigger workflows without someone approving them first.

So: "We needed to be a contributor to the PyTorch repository to execute workflows, but we didn’t feel like spending time adding features to PyTorch. Instead, we found a typo in a markdown file and submitted a fix."

I really don't like this aspect of GitHub that people who have submitted a typo fix gain additional privileges on the repo by default. That's something GitHub can fix: I think "this user gets to trigger PRs without approval in the future" should be an active button repo administrators need to click, maybe in the PR flow there could be "Approve this run" and "Approve this run and all future runs by user X" buttons.

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#14
post #3

Is 5k an appropriate amount for such a finding? Sounds incredibly cheap for such a large organization. How much would something like this be worth on the black market?

In an earlier article about the exploitation of GitHub actions in general (which this specific attack on pytorch is part of) they said:

>So far, we’ve submitted over 20 bug bounty reports, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bounties.

So I think this is part of a chain of bounties? Though that can still be argued to be a bit too low for how powerful this exploit could be :)

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#15
post #3

Is 5k an appropriate amount for such a finding? Sounds incredibly cheap for such a large organization. How much would something like this be worth on the black market?

In an earlier article about the exploitation of GitHub actions in general (which this specific attack on pytorch is part of) they said: >So far, we’ve submitted over 20 bug bounty reports, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bounties. So I think this is part of a chain of bounties? Though that can still be argued to be a bit too low for how powerful this exploit could be :)

Those are from different organizations, I think. So 5k from pytorch only but more from other orgs

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#16
How should one detect this kind of stuff?

Also reverse props to the meta bug bounty program manager for not understanding the finding initially. I know it's difficult managing a program but it's not an excuse to brush something like this off.

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#18
post #13

The key to this attack is: "The result of these settings is that, by default, any repository contributor can execute code on the self-hosted runner by submitting a malicious PR." Problem: you need to be a "contributor" to the repo for your PR to trigger workflows without someone approving them first. So: "We needed to be a contributor to the PyTorch repository to execute workflows, but we didn’t feel like spending ti…

The vast majority of repos should be able to run CI on pull requests with no privileges at all. GitHub can manage any resource utilization issues on their end.

Is the issue here that a self-hosted runner was needed for some hardware tests?

Re: A supply chain attack on PyTorch

#20
post #3

Is 5k an appropriate amount for such a finding? Sounds incredibly cheap for such a large organization. How much would something like this be worth on the black market?

This question comes of up frequently with these and it's premised on the hypothetical value of the bug on 'the black market'. The vast majority of such reported vulnerabilities have a 'black market' value of roughly zero, though, including this one. This doesn't say anything about the quality of the research, just that it's pretty hard to get monetary or other value out of most vulnerabilities.
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