How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos • Hacker News Board

Re: How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

#241

Post by Kriptonian » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 8:15 PM UTC

shlomo_z wrote: post #183

neandrake wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They first disabled rubocop to prevent further exploit, then rotated keys. If they awaited deploying the fix that would mean letting compromised keys remain valid for 9 more hours. According to their response all other tools were already sandboxed. However their response doesn't remediate putting secrets into environment variables in the first place - that is apparently acceptable to them and sets off a red flag for…

> putting secrets into environment variables in the first place - that is apparently acceptable to them and sets off a red flag for me Isn't that standard? The other options I've seen are .env files (amazing dev experience but not as secure), and AWS Secrets Manager and similar competition like Infisical. Even in the latter, you need keys to authenticate with the secrets manager and I believe it's recommended to stor…

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Re: How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

#242

Post by vntok » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 3:51 AM UTC

cube00 wrote: post #58

vntok wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they pay anything? The researchers offered them the vuln analysis for free, unprompted. If anything, they got paid in exposure.

Let's hope the grants keep coming in because those researchers will start getting offers from the darker corners of the web if bounties aren't paid.

It's their choice. If the researchers choose to accept and service criminal offers from darker corners of the web, they should be prosecuted as the criminals they have become.

Re: How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

#243

Post by xign » Tue, Aug 26, 2025, 7:49 PM UTC

dpcx wrote: post #18

hahn-kev wrote: post #16

Why does CodeRabbit need write access to the git repo? Why doesn't Github let me limit it's access?

Because it has the ability to write tests for the PR in question.

Seems like there are multiple ways to address that within the GitHub ecosystem.

For example, you can set up a GitHub Action trigged by `push_request_target` that will call CodeRabbit's API to generate a patch and then push a new commit to the branch. This way CodeRabbit is being polled by a well-defined and minimal action (since this action will have write access to repo) rather than it itself having crazy power to do anything it wants on your repository.

Alternatively, why can't they just comment and propose a patch? GitHub's code review UI allows the human code reviewer to hit a button and incorporate that change into the PR.

There are pros and cons to these other techniques but the clear pro is that it would be more secure.

It just seems like they took the easiest way out rather than thinking it through in typical AI-bro ways.

Re: How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

#244

Post by xign » Tue, Aug 26, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

cleverwebb wrote: post #38

curuinor wrote: post #25

hey, this is Howon from CodeRabbit here. we wish to note that this RCE was reported and fixed in January. it was entirely prospective and no customer data was affected. we have extensive sandboxing for basically any execution of anything now, including any and every tool and all generated code of any kind under the CodeRabbit umbrella. if you want to learn how CodeRabbit does the isolation, here's a blog post about h…

how do you know that no customer data was affected? did you work with github and scan all uses of your keys? how do you know if a use of your github key was authentic or not? did you check with anthroipic/openai/etc to scan logs usage? It's really hard to trust a "hey we got this guys" statement after a fuckup this big

Notice how replies like this never get a response?