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Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

stepsecurity.io

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Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#151

Post by homebrewer »

mnahkies wrote: post #147
ashishb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you really say you trust all of these? We need better capabilities. E.g. when I run `fd`, `rg` or similar such tool, why should it have Internet access? IMHO, just eliminating Internet access for all tools (e.g. in a power mode), might fix this. The second problem is that we have merged CI and CD. The production/release tokens should ideally not be on the same system as the ones doing regular CI. More users nee…

I've found firejail to be a useful tool for this ( https://github.com/netblue30/firejail ), and additionally use opensnitch ( https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch ) to monitor for unexpected network requests. For CI/CD using something like ArgoCD let's you avoid giving CI direct access to prod - it still needs write access to a git repo, and ideally some read access to Argo to check if deployment succeeded but it…

bubblewrap is a safer alternative to firejail because it does not use setuid to do its job, and it is used by flatpak (so hopefully has more eyes on it, but I have no idea).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap

You do have to assemble isolation scripts by hand though, it's pretty low level. Here is a decent comment which closely aligns to what I'm using to isolate npm/pnpm/yarn/etc, I see no need to repeat it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43369927

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#152

Post by bobnamob »

mubou wrote: post #6

In recent years, it's started to feel like you can't trust third-party dependencies and extensions at all anymore. I no longer install npm packages that have more than a few transitive dependencies, and I've started to refrain from installing vscode or chrome extensions altogether. Time and time again, they either get hijacked and malicious code added, or the dev themselves suddenly decides to betray everyone's trust…

Yeah, I’ve moved off vscode entirely, back to fully featured out of the box ides for me. Jetbrains make some excellent tools and I don’t need to install 25 (dubious) plugins for them to be excellent

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#153

Post by homebrewer »

mivirl wrote: post #103
ashishb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You also need to block write access, so they can’t encrypt all your files with an embedded public key. And read access so they can’t use a timing side channel to read a sensitive file and pass that info to another process with internet privileges to report the secret info back to the bad guy. You get the picture, I’m sure. Indeed. One can think of a few broad capabilities that will drastically reduce the attack sur…

> 1. Mount current read-only directory to Docker without Internet access (and without access to local network or other processes) 2. Run `fd` 3. Print the results 4. Destroy the container Systemd has a lot of neat sandboxing features [1] which aren't well known but can be very useful for this. You can get pretty far using systemd-run [2] in a script like this: #!/bin/sh uid="$(id -u)" gid="$(id -g)" cwd="$(pwd -P)" s…

If you require network (for pnpm to install packages, etc), you also often have to add readonly access to /etc/ssl, or https wouldn't work.

It might also be helpful to just use --unshare-all, and then whitelist things you actually need (--share-net, etc).

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#154

Post by ta1243 »

mubou wrote: post #6

In recent years, it's started to feel like you can't trust third-party dependencies and extensions at all anymore. I no longer install npm packages that have more than a few transitive dependencies, and I've started to refrain from installing vscode or chrome extensions altogether. Time and time again, they either get hijacked and malicious code added, or the dev themselves suddenly decides to betray everyone's trust…

This amuses me:

> But Lewis Ardern on our team wrote a Semgrep rule to find usages of tj-actions, which you can run locally (without sending code to the cloud) via: semgrep --config r/10Uz5qo/semgrep.tj-actions-compromised.

So "remote code you download from a repo automatically and run locally has been compromised, here run this remote code you download from a repo automatically and run locally to find it"

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#155

Post by ozim »

mubou wrote: post #6

In recent years, it's started to feel like you can't trust third-party dependencies and extensions at all anymore. I no longer install npm packages that have more than a few transitive dependencies, and I've started to refrain from installing vscode or chrome extensions altogether. Time and time again, they either get hijacked and malicious code added, or the dev themselves suddenly decides to betray everyone's trust…

You should never have trusted blindly in third-party dependencies in the first place.

Abnormal behavior was to trust by default.

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#156

Post by Griffinsauce »

nomilk wrote: post #60

I'd used GitHub Actions for at least 6-12 months before even realising / was not something that got parsed by the action (like a namespace and method/function), but was simply a reference to a github user name and repo. That whole object should really have been called a 'repo', because that's what it is, and that would alert users to use extreme caution whenever using one that wasn't created by themselves.

Another fun fact related to this is that when someone changes their github username, their actions break. Just a hilariously bad design IMO. There should be a repository in between with immutable versions.

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#157

Post by ebfe1 »

Doing a bit of investigation with github_events in clickhouse, it is quite clear that the accounts used to perform the attack was "2ft2dKo28UazTZ", "mmvojwip" also seems suspicious:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb...

Actions taken by the threat actor at the time can be seen here:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb...

Re: Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

#158

Post by ebfe1 »

ebfe1 wrote: post #157

Doing a bit of investigation with github_events in clickhouse, it is quite clear that the accounts used to perform the attack was "2ft2dKo28UazTZ", "mmvojwip" also seems suspicious: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb... Actions taken by the threat actor at the time can be seen here: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb...

Note that these account seems to be deleted now - 2ft2dKo28UazTZ clearly did more than just changed-files and also seem to target coinbase/agentkit as well (Actually .. they might be targeted by the threat actor)
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