GitHub Security Lab

Introducing a new tool to monitor and control the permissions of the repository token for GitHub Actions.

Learn the basics of CodeQL and how to use it for security research! In this blog, we will teach you how to leverage GitHub’s static analysis tool CodeQL to write custom CodeQL queries.

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.

Learn more about static analysis and how to use it for security research!
In this blog post series, we will take a closer look at static analysis concepts, present GitHub’s static analysis tool CodeQL, and teach you how to leverage static analysis for security research by writing custom CodeQL queries.

Writing secure code is as much of an art as writing functional code, and it is the only way to write quality code. Learn how our Secure Code Game can provide you with hands-on training to spot and fix security issues in your code so that you can build a secure code mindset.

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.

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.

See what we’re building to enhance the most integrated developer platform that allows developers and enterprises to drive innovation with ease.

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

The GitHub Security Lab provided office hours for open source projects looking to improve their security posture and reduce the risk of breach. Here’s what we learned and how you can also participate.

In this post I’ll exploit CVE-2022-20186, a vulnerability in the Arm Mali GPU kernel driver and use it to gain arbitrary kernel memory access from an untrusted app on a Pixel 6. This then allows me to gain root and disable SELinux. This vulnerability highlights the strong primitives that an attacker may gain by exploiting errors in the memory management code of GPU drivers.