Most common vulnerabilities in Github Actions: Takeaways from mass scanning open-source Github repos

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Presented at Snowfroc 2025 by

Vasilii Ermilov

GitHub Actions play a role in every open-source project, either directly or indirectly, and represent an often overlooked extension of the attack surface in Application Security. This is becoming a prime target for those seeking to compromise both open-source and commercial projects through less visible upstream dependencies. Attackers employ various established techniques, such as GitHub Actions command injection, to gain control or acquire write permissions on repositories. In this presentation, we will focus on common misconfigurations in GitHub pipelines and explore potential attack paths. Furthermore, we will present research on hundreds of GitHub projects, that were listed as bug bounty targets, uncovering possible security impacts and retelling battle stories behind bug bounty submissions. We will also look at tools and techniques that can be used to detect and mitigate those vulnerabilities.