Vulnerability research

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.

Object Graph Notation Language (OGNL) is a popular, Java-based, expression language used in popular frameworks and applications, such as Apache Struts and Atlassian Confluence. Learn more about bypassing certain OGNL injection protection mechanisms including those used by Struts and Atlassian Confluence, as well as different approaches to analyzing this form of protection so you can harden similar systems.

We’re excited to share the newest addition to our GitHub Bug Bounty Program!

It turns out that the first “all Google” phone includes a non-Google bug. Learn about the details of CVE-2022-38181, a vulnerability in the Arm Mali GPU. Join me on my journey through reporting the vulnerability to the Android security team, and the exploit that used this vulnerability to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and root on a Pixel 6 from an Android app.

Learn about the design behind, and solutions to, several of GitHub’s CTF challenge for Ekoparty’s 2022 event!

A glimpse into the backgrounds and day-to-day work of several GitHub employees in cybersecurity roles.