Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

wiz.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 179 posts

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#51

Post by muvlon »

doix wrote: post #46
procone wrote: post #19

YAML is a nightmare fuel spec. In its quest to make markup "human readable", it has created countless footguns. I honestly prefer XML at this point.

Yeah, the YAMLification of everything kinda killed my ability to understand "everything". Previously, if you knew the Linux userland well, I felt like you could figure anything out with enough digging. Take CI for example, it was Jenkins and it ran a csh/bash/zsh whatever script and captured the output. Nice and simple (even if the scripts sometimes got insane). GitHub actions is nothing like that. Weird home grown e…

And worse: GitHub Actions not a full-fledged programming environment by itself either, so you're inevitably going to have to deal with nontrivial shell scripts on top of all the YAML mess.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#52

Post by myself248 »

chrisjj wrote: post #9

> a single quote in the title breaks out of echo '...' and allows arbitrary command execution. Quote injection still alive and well in 2026. Gawd.

It's appalling that computing in general, and unix in particular, seems to have this habit of intermingling payload and overhead.

It's like in-band signalling in the telephone network, where if you whistled the right tones into your call, you could affect the way the network processed said call. Except Ma Bell responded to that system being exploited by designing a comprehensive overhaul of the way signalling was handled, and spent a squadzillion dollars upgrading millions of tons of switching equipment to categorically exclude that entire class of attack from ever being possible.

Software, on the other hand, would need to replace no equipment whatsoever. Existing processors are perfectly capable of running code that handles the length of a string separately from its contents. There are existing languages that do this, they're just.... not used. String escapes and buffer overflows exist, going on decades now, due to nothing more than laziness, inertia, and negligence.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#53

Post by mjr00 »

ctoth wrote: post #50
fg137 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen plenty of "my backlog has never been shorter" comments here. I'm interested in how that turns out 6 months later. In my team, we have plenty of enhancement requests from users. We address those that make obvious sense and are trivial to do but withhold from others, even though the code change itself is likely small. Because we don't know if there is more than a single user that can actually benefit from i…

> but withhold from others, even though the code change itself is likely small. Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.

> Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.

I assume the "gatekeeping" decision to not implement a feature request is coming from someone responsible for the product, not from a developer.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#55

Post by lelanthran »

rafram wrote: post #40
rawgabbit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand. Snowflake configured their Github repo to allow auto fixes by Copilot. It got merged automatically without anyone's review? And introduced essentially script-injection vulnerability through the title field? If this is the case, I would say Snowflake should shut down its repo and get off Github asap.

No. A Snowflake maintainer opened a PR, Copilot suggested a change (introducing a vulnerability), the maintainer accepted and committed it to their PR, and another Snowflake maintainer approved and merged the PR.

And that's going to continue because no one is reading the code even when they approve it.

It's a very strange thing indeed, but not unexpected: we warned that skills not used will eventually atrophy.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#56

Post by brewmarche »

inahga wrote: post #37

I probably would have made the same mistake. It is negligent to write GitHub Actions without using static analysis. Use zizmor in CI https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor error[template-injection]: code injection via template expansion --> .github/workflows/jira_issue.yml:24:29 | 22 | run: | | --- this run block 23 | # Escape special characters in title and body 24 | TITLE=$(echo '${{ github.event.issue.title }}' | se…

I get scared when I see these string interpolations in GitHub Actions.

Use `env:` instead and just work with environment variables in your shell script.

Yes, you still need to vet your script. Quoting is a common source of problems. Use shellcheck. Do not call eval/source/python/perl/whatever with untrusted input.

But you removed one layer of problems already by not pasting a value into your shell script code directly.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#57

Post by dataflow »

inahga wrote: post #37

I probably would have made the same mistake. It is negligent to write GitHub Actions without using static analysis. Use zizmor in CI https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor error[template-injection]: code injection via template expansion --> .github/workflows/jira_issue.yml:24:29 | 22 | run: | | --- this run block 23 | # Escape special characters in title and body 24 | TITLE=$(echo '${{ github.event.issue.title }}' | se…

Would it be fair to say the blame falls squarely on Github? Why do they even allow pasting of arbitrary strings from a title directly into a script? And if they feel there is a reason, what did they imagine the safe way to do it was?

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#58

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #49
inahga wrote: post #37

I probably would have made the same mistake. It is negligent to write GitHub Actions without using static analysis. Use zizmor in CI https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor error[template-injection]: code injection via template expansion --> .github/workflows/jira_issue.yml:24:29 | 22 | run: | | --- this run block 23 | # Escape special characters in title and body 24 | TITLE=$(echo '${{ github.event.issue.title }}' | se…

Difference is you are not a trillion dollar plus technology hyped as a harbinger of civilisational change.

I mean… it’s only Monday!

But yes, there is an interesting change in the past decade, where everything new must be over-hyped.

Perhaps it is attention overload and needing to shout. Perhaps it’s that technological progress has significantly slowed while communication options have exploded (coincidence?).

I look at it a lot like EVs. They’re great, if your use case is inside the specific band. But, that isn’t who they were being marketed to. And now… “pushback” is putting it lightly.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#59

Post by NewJazz »

ezfe wrote: post #28
NewJazz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assigning an env var to an empty variable (env: { myvar: ${{unsetfoo}} }) should trigger an error, not silently pass an empty string.

What does that have to do with YAML?

It has to do with the gha bastardization of yaml, which clearly learned nothing from ansible's deficiencies.

Re: AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira

#60

Post by NewJazz »

formerly_proven wrote: post #36
fmbb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s find for actions and workflows as long as you do no interpolation and logic. Better move as much of that as possible into your own scripts. And your scripts can be portable between forges, and even run locally!

> It’s find for actions and workflows as long as you do no interpolation and logic. How do you specify actions and workflows without interpolation and logic kind sir?

Run the same script for all of the workflow triggers and pass relevant vars into the script as environment variables.
Post reply on HN