Defensive Research, Weaponized: The 2025 State of Pipeline Security

Malicious code caching, dangling commits, pseudo-versions stealthily pointing to backdoors... Go makes you just as vulnerable as other ecosystems to social engineering attacks, and can even help malicious actors cover their tracks. Go enables new manipulation techniques to subtly trick users into downloading malicious packages. In this article, we describe various attack vectors in the Go ecosystem, from social engineering to well-known attacks such as repojacking, domain hijacking, and dependency confusion. Go's ecosystem guarantees integrity, not trust.

A routine disclosure unraveled a class of Bot-Delegated Time-Of-Check to Time-Of-Use race conditions where helpful automation bots (often GitHub Apps) may sometimes promote untrusted code changes from a fork to a victim repo, enabling the insertion of a "side-door" malicious workflow.

Your trusty Dependabot (and other GitHub bots) might be an unwitting accomplice. Through "Confused Deputy" attacks, they can be tricked into merging malicious code. This doesn’t stop here. It can escalate to full command injection via crafted branch names and even bypass branch protection rules. Plus, we disclose two new TTPs to build upon previously known techniques.

CI/CD remains a stealthy and soft target for supply chain attacks—especially via linters, formatters, build and test tools. This guide breaks down Living Off the Pipeline (LOTP) techniques, where attackers exploit CI tools already present and without modifying the workflow itself—using config files, plugins, and environment variables instead.