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heh, a friend actually pointed out a typo on a first draft and said "maybe you shouldn't fix it to show it's not LLM written".

It's not just based on that, if you read the linked report from 2023 (https://blog.ammaraskar.com/vscode-rce/), I had a bug with the exact same impact of token exfiltration (It did need one additional click on the VSCode interface). They marked it as low severity, fixed it silently, didn't acknowledge that it had security impact and did not provide me any credit much less a bounty.

I thought that the general issue was that they ignore the submissions and do not fix them - but the actual problem is that they give different severity and may not give fame or money? I think disclosure for those reasons is highly in gray area from ethical perspective. Regardless if it was clearly in the scope of the bug bounty program or not. That is distinct problem and does not justify public disclosure without warning with enough time.

Update as of 3rd June: Microsoft has fixed this with a stopgap fix by adding a confirmation when opening notebooks in web VSCode and not allowing trusted publisher to be skipped by commands (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/319705).

That's probably one of the fastest responses I've seen from a vendor.


You cannot, it doesn't go through the regular OAuth flow. GitHub just automatically grants it a token.

Oh, i see thanks for the reply.

1 and 2 are correct, take a look at the PoC repo here: https://github.com/ammaraskar/github-dev-token-steal-poc/tre...

We can try to just put a `my-extension/extension.js` for the most direct execution but the CSP blocks that. It's only a script-src CSP blocking it though, so fetching the package.json is still kosher. So we end up using it to contribute a keybinding instead.


Thank you, that's a very kind comment.

I have no interest in selling these vulnerabilities or sitting on them. At the same time, it feels really bad to have a vendor disrespect the hours it can take to make a proof-of-concept by just patching it silently and not crediting you or acknowledging it.


> instead of clout

I'm catching up on the infosec twitter side but it seems like it was even worse. A lot of people have the same story as me in 2023 of "they silently patch the bug and don't even credit you" which really stinks.


That’s most of the why it’s tough to be upset when people just release 0-days on Twitter - especially for big firms.

It definitely reminds me of the stereotypes of big business types stepping on the little guys to climb the ladder.

I hope you get credit where credit is due in future endeavors.


> it'd be awesome if the in-browser IDE launched with a temporary per-repo permission scope

That's actually exactly what they do for codespaces. The token only has read/write on the repo you activated for the codespace [1]. They should definitely consider doing that for github.dev as well.

[1] https://orca.security/resources/blog/hacking-github-codespac...


Or they could’ve kept their bounty program running smoothly. But instead they pissed off another security researcher and received a zero days heads-up before public disclosure.

There is no excuse. GitHub runs a great program on HackerOne and it should just have been submitted there.

Also note that the person who found this was pissed because they had a difficult experience with submitting a bug for VSCode THREE YEARS AGO through MSRC which is _completely different_ than the GitHub H1 program and no doubt much more challenging with a different experience.

There is really no excuse for this irresponsible disclosure. They could have at least tried instead of holding a grudge for three years.


> GitHub runs a great program on HackerOne

I agree, for the record here's my HackerOne profile https://hackerone.com/ammar2/hacktivity?type=user

Just for context, that 2023 bug was initially reported to GitHub's HackerOne program and they explicitly told me it was out of scope for them and to take it to MSRC:

> We have reviewed the report and determined that the vulnerabilities is in VS code and the fix will be implemented by Microsoft. As a result, it is not eligible for reward under the Bug Bounty program. Please follow-up with Microsoft via the report you submitted.

There was also an additional bug that allowed an attacker to exfiltrate private repo contents with a github.dev link that MSRC also marked as not having security impact.

I absolutely loved working with GitHub folks on the GitHub bug bounty program, they're responsive, go into technical details with you and are awesome to deal with. MSRC is like the polar opposite of that.


Also, the Github enterprise code is "obfuscated" but it uses a trivially reversible method just meant to be a minor roadblock. After you get past that you get the full ruby source code, no minification or anything.

For a while the key was literally:

> This obfuscation is intended to discourage GitHub Enterprise customers from making modifications to the VM. We know this 'encryption' is easily broken.


PEPs aren't necessarily just for language changes, e.g https://peps.python.org/pep-0436/ which is largely a CPython implementation detail.


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