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Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

trufflesecurity.com

191–200 of 394 posts

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#191
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bug bounty, not a "only if we have time to fix it" bounty. He found a security problem, they decided not to act on it, but it was still an acknowledged security problem

> It's a bug bounty, not a "only if we have time to fix it" bounty It's only a bug if it's not intended

Do some companies intend for their platform to feature remote code execution?

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#193
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article pointed out, GitHub already publicly documented this vulnerability. My employer doesn't pay out for known security issues, especially if we have mitigating controls. A lot of people spam us with vulnerability reports from security tools we already use. At least half of them turn out to be false positives we are already aware of. In my opinion, running a bug bounty program at all is a net negative for u…

> As the article pointed out, GitHub already publicly documented this vulnerability. I'm honestly not yet convinced that is enough here - I've fallen victim to this without realizing it - the behaviour here is so far removed from how I suspect most user's mental model of github.com works. For me none of the exposed data is sensitive, but the point remains I was totally unawares it would be retrievable like this. If t…

Two thinks can be true (and are)

1. GitHub has a nasty privacy/security hole, where commonsense expectations about the meanings of common words are violated by the system.

2. Github has publicly announced that they don't care about this part of user data security (private code), so won't pay people to know tell them what they alreay know and announced.

Github won't pay you to tell them they are wrong when everyone alreay knows.

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#195

IMO, the real vulnerability here is the way the Github Events archive exposes the SHA1 hashes of the vulnerable repositories. It would be easy to trawl the entire network to access these deleted/private repositories, but only because they have a list of them. Similar (but less concerning) is the ability to use short SHA1 hashes. You'd have to either be targeting a particular repository (for example, one for which a m…

Somebody FireSheep this!

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#196
post #4

I reported this on their HackerOne many years ago (2018 it seems) and they said it was working as intended. Conclusion: don't use private forks. Copy the repository instead. Here is their full response from back then: > Thanks for the submission! We have reviewed your report and validated your findings. After internally assessing the finding we have determined it is a known low risk issue. We may make this functional…

There seems to be no such thing as a "private fork" on GitHub in 2024 [1]: > A fork is a new repository that shares code and visibility settings with the upstream repository. All forks of public repositories are public. You cannot change the visibility of a fork. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...

A fork of a private repo is private. When you make the original repo public, the fork is still a private repo, but the commits can now be accessed by hash.

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really isn’t. Anyone who uses that word that way is just factually incorrect, and probably pretty irresponsible depending on the context. Software should not tell lies.

> delete: remove or obliterate (written or printed matter), especially by drawing a line through it or marking it with a delete sign Which is, indeed, what every modern database does.

I think you are referring to tombstoning. That's usually a temporary process that may immediately delete the underlying data, keeping a tombstone to ensure the deletion propagates to all storage nodes. A compaction process purges the underlying data (if still present) and the tombstones after a suitable delay. It's a fancy delete that takes some time to process, but the data is eventually gone. You could turn off the compaction, if you wanted.

I believe Kafka make deletion difficult, since it's an append-only log, but Kafka doesn't work well with laws that require deletion of data, so I don't believe it's a popular choice any longer (I.E. isn't modern).

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#199

Users should never be expected to know these gotchas for a feature called "private", documented or not. It's disappointing to see GitHub calling it a feature instead of a bug, to me it just shows a complete lack of care about security. Privacy features should _always_ have a strict, safe default. In the meantime I'll be calling "private" repos "unlisted", seems more appropriate

> It's disappointing to see GitHub calling it a feature instead of a bug

git is a "distributed" version control software afterall. It means a peer can't control everything.

Re: Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

#200
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be no such thing as a "private fork" on GitHub in 2024 [1]: > A fork is a new repository that shares code and visibility settings with the upstream repository. All forks of public repositories are public. You cannot change the visibility of a fork. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...

A fork of a private repo is private. When you make the original repo public, the fork is still a private repo, but the commits can now be accessed by hash.

According to the screenshot in the documentation, though, new commits made to the fork will not be accessible by hash. So private feature branches in forks may be accessible via the upstream that was changed to public, if those branches existed at the time the upstream's visibility changed, but new feature branches made after that time won't be accessible.
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