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Comment by Scaled | Hacker News Reader

Gitea action runner has a bunch of different ways to setup and doing the isolation properly looks tricky. The documentation doesn't provide any isolation tests to administrators, either.

The biggest mitigation is that gitea documentation discourages you from using action runners from untrusted users. Not flawless security, but it's something...

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> The biggest mitigation is that gitea documentation discourages you from using action runners from untrusted users.

This recommendation seems incompatible with third-party collaboration, at least on its face!

Potentially, but for many projects things like that are tools that you want to control access to anyway. Anyone wanting to update the CI/CD process who isn't a trusted part of the project should be having their changes properly reviewed by someone who is anyway, at which point the reviewer is the trusted user not the random external entity.

I don’t disagree with that, but I think GitHub has shown that projects want to have their cake and eat it too. GitHub has also shown that it’s incredibly easy to design an insecure CI/CD that satisfies that goal, but I see that more as a symptom of them being first-to-market rather than an inherent quality of the problem.

Wait, isn't this about protecting the machine running the actions? If someone hosts a project on Github and allows anyone to run actions, it's Github's problem if there's a vulnerability to exploit. It's their installations that are going to get compromised, not necessarily the project's data.

The idea is you first review PRs from external contributors before allowing the CI to run on them.

I understand the idea. The point was that it isn't good enough: humans are fallible, so you still want to provide a secure CI/CD environment for untrusted external contributors.

Many projects have CI setups that run code (Makefile can run any code, for example). Which means, an untrusted third-party contribution would allow that party to run arbitrary code on CI platform. Yes, the solution is to not let untrusted third-party code to be run without manual review.

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