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1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

blog.ammaraskar.com

41–50 of 116 posts

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#41
I don’t really understand why more devs don’t try Neovim.

Maybe it’s just my preference, but I like having a small setup where I know what is installed and what is running. With VSCode, browser IDEs, extensions, sync, tokens, and random plugins, it gets hard to tell what actually has access to what.

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#43
Kudos for the public disclosure. Too many people haven't been happy with MSRC and it's starting to boil over (see the Nightmare Eclipse situation, too). Maybe all of these disclosures will cause them to do some introspection and realize they're the problem. I highly doubt that, but one can dream.

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#45

I don’t really understand why more devs don’t try Neovim. Maybe it’s just my preference, but I like having a small setup where I know what is installed and what is running. With VSCode, browser IDEs, extensions, sync, tokens, and random plugins, it gets hard to tell what actually has access to what.

I noticed that is quite hard to make people change habits regarding software. There is shortcuts to learn and we might feel slow at first which reinforces the feeling of « it’s not better ». It takes a while to get used to nvim, once there it’s faster but that explain why many people stay in their confort zone

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#46

I don’t really understand why more devs don’t try Neovim. Maybe it’s just my preference, but I like having a small setup where I know what is installed and what is running. With VSCode, browser IDEs, extensions, sync, tokens, and random plugins, it gets hard to tell what actually has access to what.

I really like Helix. I didn't dig into Neovim much but Helix has pretty nice IDE-like features that I always missed from vim (without riddling it with plugins or using SpaceVim or such). Check it out, maybe you'll like it as well.

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#47
post #43

Kudos for the public disclosure. Too many people haven't been happy with MSRC and it's starting to boil over (see the Nightmare Eclipse situation, too). Maybe all of these disclosures will cause them to do some introspection and realize they're the problem. I highly doubt that, but one can dream.

I am not sure if this is still the best approach. They did not even try to submit based on expected "low" ranking when comparing to existing XSS submission. They should at least try or let them know many days before disclosing. You never know.

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#48
The attack surface that makes this particularly nasty is that VSCode extensions run with the same trust level as the editor itself, and most developers have dozens installed without reviewing their permissions. A malicious or compromised extension silently exfiltrating GitHub tokens is undetectable without network monitoring. This is a good argument for running extensions in isolated profiles.

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#49

> the last time I interacted with MSRC regarding reporting a VSCode bug, it was a horrible experience where they silently fixed the bug Classic MSRC. It has figured out that researchers will report for free regardless. Why change?

MSRC doesn’t fix bugs. I don’t know the specifics of this case, but I’ve managed bug bounty programs in the past through Bountysource and HackerOne. One thing that occasionally happens is that a report makes its way to the development team before the security team has fully assessed it, in this case MSRC. At that point, a developer may decide to quietly fix the issue. Sometimes that’s driven by a concern, rational or…

> They have no visibility into the internal history of the bug or whether someone already patched it.

Aww man, if only they owned some sort of platform for tracking those, powered by some sort of program. Doesn't even have to be a smart problem, it can be, succintly, shortly, stupid. If only.

Re: 1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug

#50

I had this happen to me recently github token got stolen and also cloudflare tokens guys even if you take security seriously you are going to get hit on a long enough time frame best thing to do is segregate and control damage trust no one, nothing, use orbstack, and always operate under the assumption that your token is going to get leaked at some point it knocked off my entire momentum. fortunately seemed like it w…

Secret ad to orbstack.
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