PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
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Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#2Incident report of a recent attack campaign targeting GitHub Actions workflows to exfiltrate PyPI tokens, our response, and steps to protect your projects.
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#3> Attackers targeted a wide variety of repositories, many of which had PyPI tokens stored as GitHub secrets, modifying their workflows to send those tokens to external servers. While the attackers successfully exfiltrated some tokens, they do not appear to have used them on PyPI.
It's wild to me that people entrust a third-party CI system with API secrets, and then also entrust that same system to run "actions" provided by other third parties.
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#4While Python being more widely used than JS, it's interesting the majority of attacks and breaches come from NPM. The consensus seems to be that Python offering a standard library greatly reduces the attack surface over JS. I tend to agree with this, a decently large Flask python app I am working on has 15 entries in requirements.txt (many of which being Flask plugins).
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#5While Python being more widely used than JS, it's interesting the majority of attacks and breaches come from NPM. The consensus seems to be that Python offering a standard library greatly reduces the attack surface over JS. I tend to agree with this, a decently large Flask python app I am working on has 15 entries in requirements.txt (many of which being Flask plugins).
The large attack surface with npm is partly because of all the transitive dependencies used, which means that even if you only pull in a dozen packages directly, you're also using hundreds of other packages. Running `pip freeze` will list a lot of transitive dependencies as well, but I'm sure it'll be less than an equivalent JS project.
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#6While Python being more widely used than JS, it's interesting the majority of attacks and breaches come from NPM. The consensus seems to be that Python offering a standard library greatly reduces the attack surface over JS. I tend to agree with this, a decently large Flask python app I am working on has 15 entries in requirements.txt (many of which being Flask plugins).
The most important packages in the Python world don't have a lot of their own dependencies. Numpy has none, for example. The bulk of Numpy is non-Python code and interfaces/wrappers for that; the standard library isn't AFAIK pulling a whole lot of weight there.
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#7Huge kudos to Mike for handling this attack and appropriately contacting the maintainers.
I’m also glad to see yet another case where having Trusted Publishing configured would have prevented the attack. That’s a cheap defense that has proven effective once again!
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#8While Python being more widely used than JS, it's interesting the majority of attacks and breaches come from NPM. The consensus seems to be that Python offering a standard library greatly reduces the attack surface over JS. I tend to agree with this, a decently large Flask python app I am working on has 15 entries in requirements.txt (many of which being Flask plugins).
The most important packages in the Python world don't have a lot of their own dependencies. Numpy has none, for example. The bulk of Numpy is non-Python code and interfaces/wrappers for that; the standard library isn't AFAIK pulling a whole lot of weight there.
Numpy depends on BLAS and LAPACK.
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most important packages in the Python world don't have a lot of their own dependencies. Numpy has none, for example. The bulk of Numpy is non-Python code and interfaces/wrappers for that; the standard library isn't AFAIK pulling a whole lot of weight there.
Numpy depends on BLAS and LAPACK.
while those are obviously huge dependencies, i think the claim was about _python_ dependencies
Re: PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
#10> Attackers targeted a wide variety of repositories, many of which had PyPI tokens stored as GitHub secrets, modifying their workflows to send those tokens to external servers. While the attackers successfully exfiltrated some tokens, they do not appear to have used them on PyPI. It's wild to me that people entrust a third-party CI system with API secrets, and then also entrust that same system to run "actions" provi…
it's even worse that that
the CI system itself encourages you to import random third party code into your CI workflow, based on mutable tags
which then receives full privileges
the entire thing is insane