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GitHub Account Renaming May Have Led to Provide Chain Assaults

By Ionut Arghire on October 27, 2022

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Checkmarx warns that attackers might have exploited the renaming of standard GitHub accounts to create malicious repositories utilizing the vacated identify and launch software program provide chain assaults.

The approach, dubbed RepoJacking, entails the hijacking of a renamed repository’s site visitors by breaking GitHub’s redirection mechanism, and routing the site visitors to a malicious repository managed by the attacker.

Every GitHub repository has a novel URL below the consumer account that created it and, every time the repository is cloned, the total repository URL is used.

When a consumer modifications their GitHub account username, the URL is modified by changing the previous username with the brand new one, and the code-hosting platform routinely redirects customers to the brand new URL (for instance, github.com/username/repo turns into github.com/new-username/repo).

An attacker conscious of the change might have hijacked the previous URL site visitors by making a GitHub account utilizing the previous username, after which making a repository matching the previous repository’s identify, thus gaining management over the github.com/username/repo URL and breaking the default redirect.

“A GitHub repository is weak to RepoJacking when its creator decides to rename his username whereas the previous username is obtainable for registration. Now we have proven the coupling within the repository URLs between the repository identify and the creator username, and this implies attackers can create a brand new GitHub account having the identical mixture to match the previous repository URL utilized by current customers,” Checkmarx notes.

To forestall such assaults, GitHub carried out a mechanism to ‘retire’ repositories with over 100 clones on the time the consumer renames their account. Nevertheless, GitHub would solely take into account as retired the namespace, or the mix of username and repository identify.

Thus, ought to a consumer resolve to vary their account’s username, a malicious attacker might then create a brand new GitHub account utilizing the previous username, however wouldn’t be allowed to create below it a repository utilizing a reputation that might match a ‘retired’ mixture.

What Checkmarx found was that the ‘standard repository namespace retirement’ safety measure might be simply bypassed.

For that, an attacker would want to create a brand new GitHub account with an arbitrary identify, create a repository with the identify of the goal repository, switch the possession of the repository to a unique account, then rename the second account to the previous username of a just lately renamed account.

Thus, they might achieve management over the URL containing each the previous username and the repository identify of the focused standard account, and will launch software program provide chain assaults.

“Profitable exploitation permits the takeover of standard code packages in a number of bundle managers, together with ‘Packagist’, ‘Go’, ‘Swift’, and extra. Now we have recognized over 10,000 packages in these bundle managers utilizing renamed usernames and are prone to being weak to this method in case a brand new bypass is discovered,” Checkmarx notes.

The software program safety firm explains that the bypass might additionally enable attackers to take management of standard GitHub actions consumed by specifying a GitHub namespace, which might result in main provide chain assaults.

Checkmarx says it initially recognized the namespace retirement safety bypass in November 2021 and that GitHub has made a number of makes an attempt to handle it, with an entire patch rolled out in September 2022.

“The mechanism that was discovered weak, the ‘Common repository namespace retirement’, stays a pretty assault level for provide chain attackers sooner or later,” Checkmarx says.

Because of this, the corporate has launched an open supply software to assist determine packages which can be in danger, warning that an attacker exploited an identical problem earlier this 12 months to hijack and poison PHP packages which have hundreds of thousands of downloads.

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