Vulnerability research

For this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the GitHub bug bounty team is excited to feature another spotlight on a talented security researcher who participates in the GitHub Security Bug Bounty Program—@inspector-ambitious!

In this post, I’ll exploit CVE-2023-3420, a type confusion in Chrome that allows remote code execution (RCE) in the renderer sandbox of Chrome by a single visit to a malicious site.

The GitHub Security Lab audits open source projects for security vulnerabilities and helps maintainers fix them. Recently, we passed the milestone of 500 CVEs disclosed. Let’s take a trip down memory lane with a review of some noteworthy CVEs!

Learn how GitHub’s CodeQL leveraged AI modeling and multi-repository variant analysis to discover a new CVE in Gradle.

In this post, we’ll deep dive into some interesting attacks on mTLS authentication. We’ll have a look at implementation vulnerabilities and how developers can make their mTLS systems vulnerable to user impersonation, privilege escalation, and information leakages.

It was another record year for our Security Bug Bounty program! We’re excited to highlight some achievements we’ve made together with the bounty community in 2022!

This blog post describes two security vulnerabilities in Decidim, a digital platform for citizen participation. Both vulnerabilities were addressed by the Decidim team with corresponding update releases for the supported versions in May 2023.

GitHub has identified a low-volume social engineering campaign that targets the personal accounts of employees of technology firms. No GitHub or npm systems were compromised in this campaign. We’re publishing this blog post as a warning for our customers to prevent exploitation by this threat actor.

GitHub’s VIP Bug Bounty Program has been updated to include a clear and accessible criteria for receiving an invitation to the program and more. Learn more about the program and how you can become a Hacktocat, and join our community of researchers who are contributing to GitHub’s security with fun perks and access to staff and beta features!

In this blog, I’ll look at CVE-2022-46395, a variant of CVE-2022-36449 (Project Zero issue 2327), and use it to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and root privileges from the untrusted app domain on an Android phone that uses the Arm Mali GPU. I’ll also explain how root cause analysis of CVE-2022-36449 led to the discovery of CVE-2022-46395.

Code scanning detects ReDoS vulnerabilities automatically, but fixing them isn’t always easy. This blog post describes a 4-step strategy for fixing ReDoS bugs.

In this post, I’ll look at a security-related change in version r40p0 of the Arm Mali driver that was AWOL in the January update of the Pixel bulletin, where other patches from r40p0 was applied, and how these two lines of changes can be exploited to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and root from a malicious app. This highlights how treacherous it can be when backporting security changes.

Multi-repository variant analysis lets you scale security research across thousands of repositories, giving you a powerful tool to find and respond to newly discovered vulnerabilities.

The GitHub Security Lab audited DataHub, an open source metadata platform, and discovered several vulnerabilities in the platform’s authentication and authorization modules. These vulnerabilities could have enabled an attacker to bypass authentication and gain access to sensitive data stored on the platform.

CVE-2022-25664, a vulnerability in the Qualcomm Adreno GPU, can be used to leak large amounts of information to a malicious Android application. Learn more about how the vulnerability can be used to leak information in both the user space and kernel space level of pages, and how the GitHub Security Lab used the kernel space information leak to construct a KASLR bypass.