the research arm of Boost Security
$ find articles/ -name '*.md' | sort -r

Archive

25 articles

$ ls articles/
## 2026
Don't Go with the flaw
research

Go Supply Chain Security in Brief

TL;DR

Go reduces some dependency risks, but module paths, repository ownership, and proxy caching still create opportunities for attackers.

Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline Security Researcher

Sébastien brings Red Team expertise to the research team and is a major contributor to the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project. He maintains and continuously improves Boost Security's large-scale infrastructure for hunting vulnerabilities in open source build pipelines, and handles coordinated disclosure with the company's largest customers. An avid CTF player who has won several prestigious competitions, he contributes actively to the team's most cutting-edge research.
5 min 2026-11-02
emBarrass: Putting the “em” in MITM. Colorful terminal-inspired example results: curl embarrassed, gh trust held, npm no signal.
tools

emBarrass: Putting the “em” in MITM.

TL;DR

We shipped detection rules in Boost Security Developer Endpoint Protection and Dazio. Now meet emBarrass: our open-source tool for showing whether your everyday developer tools still trust a weak CA key.

Boost Security Labs
Boost Security Labs
Boost Security Labs Security Research Team

Boost Security Labs is the security research arm of Boost Security, hunting vulnerabilities in CI/CD pipelines, disclosing responsibly, and building tools to secure the software supply chain.
3 min 2026-10-21
Nested dolls decorated with workflow and action symbols above an actions.lock blueprint, beside a small robot tagged @main.
research

Pinning the Unpinnable: Taking GitHub Actions Lockfiles Apart

TL;DR

GitHub Actions workflow lockfiles entered public preview on October 14, 2026, moving dependency pins into a lockfile and extending them to previously “unpinnable” actions: dependencies nested inside composite actions that you couldn’t pin from your own workflow. We adopted them in poutine’s CI/CD and tested both nested dependency pinning and fork pull request behavior. Locked dependencies stayed fixed when upstream branches moved, and Require lockfile blocked workflows without lockfile coverage. We also found and reported a validation defect that allowed a fork-only commit to pass as an upstream action. GitHub deployed a backend fix within hours, and our retest confirmed that the bypass was closed while a legitimate locked workflow continued to run. A CLI verification fix is still pending.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
14 min 2026-10-15
Sleeper Squats: How a Hyphen (Almost) Unraveled GitHub's Immutable OIDC Subject Claim
research

Sleeper Squats: How a Hyphen (Almost) Unraveled GitHub's Immutable OIDC Subject Claim

TL;DR

In late April 2026, GitHub shipped a changelog post introducing immutable subject claims for GitHub Actions OIDC tokens, then pulled the post six hours later. The feature stayed live in production into the next day. During that short window, I (and, as I'd learn later, at least one other person) realized the new `<org>-<org_id>` format opens a pre-hijack opportunity: anyone can register a legacy organization whose name is a perfect string collision for a future victim's immutable subject claim, then wait for the victim to opt in. I disclosed via HackerOne the next morning; the feature was disabled in production about an hour later. GitHub later reshipped it with `@` (not a hyphen) as the delimiter, which closes the collision; the namespace-recycling problem it addresses was first disclosed by Tal Skverer in February 2025.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
13 min 2026-06-11
Trusted Publishing, Untrusted Branch: Inside the Red Hat npm Compromise
threat-intel

Trusted Publishing, Untrusted Branch: Inside the Red Hat npm Compromise

TL;DR

More than 30 @redhat-cloud-services npm packages shipped a credential-stealing worm. How they were published is now well-documented across several independent reports. We focus on the uncomfortable part: every supply-chain trust control passed. The packages carried valid SLSA provenance, npm trusted publishing accepted them, and branch protection on main was never touched. They passed because trusted publishing anchors trust to a workflow filename on any branch, not to a protected release identity, and the provenance that vouched for the packages faithfully recorded the throwaway branch that nobody checked.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
15 min 2026-06-01
SmokedMeat: A Red Team Tool to Hack Your Pipelines First
tools

SmokedMeat: A Red Team Tool to Hack Your Pipelines First

TL;DR

In March 2026, TeamPCP unleashed mayhem on the software supply chain: compromising Trivy, LiteLLM, KICS, Telnyx, and dozens of npm packages, proving that CI/CD pipelines are the softest target. Today we're open-sourcing SmokedMeat, the first red team framework for build pipelines (i.e. CI/CD), so defenders can finally see the full kill chain for themselves.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
7 min 2026-04-15
Deployment Poisoning: A Novel Attack Vector for GitHub Actions
techniques

Deployment Poisoning: A(nother) Novel Attack Vector for GitHub Actions

TL;DR

A newly discovered attack technique allowing attackers to inject commands and exfiltrate secrets by creating malicious deployments from fork pull requests. Exploits the trust assumption that deployments come from verified services like Vercel, affecting popular integrations including Argos CI and Checkly.

Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline Security Researcher

Sébastien brings Red Team expertise to the research team and is a major contributor to the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project. He maintains and continuously improves Boost Security's large-scale infrastructure for hunting vulnerabilities in open source build pipelines, and handles coordinated disclosure with the company's largest customers. An avid CTF player who has won several prestigious competitions, he contributes actively to the team's most cutting-edge research.
7 min 2026-04-07
TeamPCP Compromises LiteLLM
threat-intel

TeamPCP Compromises LiteLLM: Credential Stealer in PyPI, 70 Repos Exposed

TL;DR

TeamPCP published two malicious litellm versions to PyPI containing a .pth infostealer that runs on every Python startup. A compromised maintainer account was then used to silence the disclosure, deface repositories, and expose 70 private BerriAI repos in minutes. This is a Boost Security contribution to a broader community investigation: multiple teams worked this incident in parallel, each bringing their own angle. We focused on CI/CD forensics and GitHub account takeover evidence. The hunt continues.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
20 min 2026-03-24
20 Days Later: Trivy Compromise, Act II
threat-intel

20 Days Later: Trivy Compromise, Act II

TL;DR

Almost exactly one year after the tj-actions/changed-files compromise, history repeats. Twenty days after the February Pwn Request on Trivy that we covered in our previous report, the attacker regained access to the Aqua Security org (through a vector still under investigation) and weaponized the aqua-bot service account. On March 19, 2026, poisoned v0.69.4 releases of Trivy were pushed through GitHub Releases, Docker registries, and 75 of 76 tags on the trivy-action GitHub Action. This is an early publication in the interest of community threat hunting; our investigation is ongoing.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
13 min 2026-03-20
MegaGame10418: A Throwaway Account Linked to the Hackerbot-Claw Attack
threat-intel

MegaGame10418: A Throwaway Account Linked to the Hackerbot-Claw Attack

TL;DR

Between February 27–28, 2026, the GitHub user 'hackerbot-claw' launched an automated Pwn Request campaign targeting eight high-profile repositories using the AI agent 'openclaw.' Our Package Threat Hunter caught the attack in progress. Further investigation revealed 'MegaGame10418'—a throwaway account that predated the campaign by a month—used to test the same injection techniques against a vulnerable NewRelic test repository.

Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline Security Researcher

Sébastien brings Red Team expertise to the research team and is a major contributor to the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project. He maintains and continuously improves Boost Security's large-scale infrastructure for hunting vulnerabilities in open source build pipelines, and handles coordinated disclosure with the company's largest customers. An avid CTF player who has won several prestigious competitions, he contributes actively to the team's most cutting-edge research.
6 min 2026-03-02
Unveiling Bagel: Why Your Developer's Laptop is the Softest Target in Your Supply Chain
tools

Unveiling Bagel: Why Your Developer's Laptop is the Softest Target in Your Supply Chain

TL;DR

We're releasing bagel, an open-source CLI that inventories security-relevant metadata on developer workstations. Credentials, misconfigs, and exposed secrets. It's cross-platform, privacy-first, and designed to help security teams understand the attack surface that modern supply chain adversaries are actively exploiting. Stay tuned for more exciting news about how Boost works to secure every part of the modern software factory (developer endpoints included).

Alexis-Maurer Fortin
Alexis-Maurer Fortin
Alexis-Maurer Fortin Senior Product Security Engineer

Alexis-Maurer is a co-creator of poutine and the architect behind Boost Security's large-scale cloud scanning infrastructure. He single-handedly created bagel, the open source developer workstation security scanner, and remains its core maintainer. He is also an active contributor to Dazio. A prolific Go developer, he wrote the majority of the codebase powering the team's automated vulnerability discovery systems.
5 min 2026-02-11
## 2025
Defensive Research, Weaponized: The 2025 State of Pipeline Security
threat-intel

Defensive Research, Weaponized: The 2025 State of Pipeline Security

TL;DR

2025 didn't give us a new, magical Supply Chain vuln class; instead it gave us attackers who finally started reading our manuals. From Ultralytics' pull_request_target 0-day through Kong, tj-actions, GhostAction, Nx, GlassWorm and both Shai-Hulud waves, the common pattern wasn't typosquats but Pipeline Parasitism: living off CI/CD, maintainer accounts and developer endpoints using the same tools and patterns we published to defend them. The vuln mechanics stayed boring: shell injections and over-privileged tokens. But they were operationalized with worms, invisible Unicode payloads, blockchain C2, and even wiper failsafes. Thankfully, platforms are finally improving, yet "pwn request" is here to stay; the only sustainable answer is to treat pipelines as production systems and publish future research assuming adversaries are our most diligent readers!

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
21 min 2025-12-08
Don't Go with the flaw
research

Don't Go with the flaw

TL;DR

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.

Garance de la Brosse
Garance De La Brosse
Garance De La Brosse ex-Junior Security Researcher

Garance completed her M. Eng thesis with the team, focusing on distribution threats to the Go ecosystem and package manager vulnerabilities.
22 min 2025-12-03
Split-Second Side Doors: How Bot-Delegated TOCTOU Breaks The CI/CD Threat Model
research

Split-Second Side Doors: How Bot-Delegated TOCTOU Breaks The CI/CD Threat Model

TL;DR

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.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
14 min 2025-11-12
Weaponizing Dependabot: Pwn Request at its Finest
techniques

Weaponizing Dependabot: Pwn Request at its Finest

TL;DR

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.

Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline Security Researcher

Sébastien brings Red Team expertise to the research team and is a major contributor to the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project. He maintains and continuously improves Boost Security's large-scale infrastructure for hunting vulnerabilities in open source build pipelines, and handles coordinated disclosure with the company's largest customers. An avid CTF player who has won several prestigious competitions, he contributes actively to the team's most cutting-edge research.
15 min 2025-06-01
Exploiting CI/CD with Style(lint): LOTP Guide
techniques

Exploiting CI/CD with Style(lint): LOTP Guide

TL;DR

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.

Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline
Sébastien Graveline Security Researcher

Sébastien brings Red Team expertise to the research team and is a major contributor to the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project. He maintains and continuously improves Boost Security's large-scale infrastructure for hunting vulnerabilities in open source build pipelines, and handles coordinated disclosure with the company's largest customers. An avid CTF player who has won several prestigious competitions, he contributes actively to the team's most cutting-edge research.
6 min 2025-04-15
From Pandora's Box to Nuclear Fishing: Escalating Threats in Build Pipelines Security
threat-intel

From Pandora's Box to Nuclear Fishing: Escalating Threats in Build Pipelines Security

TL;DR

We've been quiet lately (despite recent Supply Chain drama) because we wanted a clearer picture before chiming in. Attacks on popular GitHub Actions (tj-actions/changed-files and reviewdog/action-setup) have shocked us, but not surprised us. They simply proved the point we had warned about. Alarmingly, reviewdog automatically promoted “typo-fixers” to maintainers overnight. Combine that with GitHub's audit logging gaps (attackers can update releases leaving no trace) and we've got a real mess. It’s time we reassess our threat models and demand better visibility.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
6 min 2025-03-19
Under The Radar: Zero-Days in Open Source Build Pipelines
research

Under The Radar: Zero-Days in Open Source Build Pipelines

TL;DR

Our deep dive into open source projects’ CI/CD systems has revealed that build pipelines can be just as vulnerable as any other link in the software supply chain. We found hundreds of zero days on open source projects’ build pipelines with our detection at scale and responsibly disclosed them. Jump to the Research at Scale section to learn more.

Alexis-Maurer Fortin
Alexis-Maurer Fortin
Alexis-Maurer Fortin Senior Product Security Engineer

Alexis-Maurer is a co-creator of poutine and the architect behind Boost Security's large-scale cloud scanning infrastructure. He single-handedly created bagel, the open source developer workstation security scanner, and remains its core maintainer. He is also an active contributor to Dazio. A prolific Go developer, he wrote the majority of the codebase powering the team's automated vulnerability discovery systems.
9 min 2025-02-25
## 2024
Unveiling 'poutine': An Open Source Build Pipelines security scanner
tools

Unveiling 'poutine': An Open Source Build Pipelines security scanner

TL;DR

Boost Security is thrilled to announce ‘poutine’ – an Open Source security scanner CLI you can use to detect misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in Build Pipelines. Additionally, it can create an inventory of build-time dependencies so you can track known vulnerabilities (CVEs) as well. Today, the tool has about a dozen rules covering vulnerabilities found in GitHub Actions workflows and Gitlab pipelines. We have plans to add support for CircleCI, Azure Pipelines and more. The source code is published under the Apache 2.0 license and it is available on GitHub.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
5 min 2024-04-14
Opening Pandora’s box - Supply Chain Insider Threats in Open Source projects
research

Opening Pandora’s box - Supply Chain Insider Threats in Open Source projects

TL;DR

Granting repository Write access in an Open Source project is a high-stakes decision. We delve into the risks of insider threats, using a responsible disclosure for the AWS Karpenter project to demonstrate why strict safeguards are essential.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
10 min 2024-03-14
The tale of a Supply Chain near-miss incident
research

The tale of a Supply Chain near-miss incident

TL;DR

We disclosed to Chainguard in December 2023 that one of their GitHub Actions workflows was vulnerable to pwn request, potentially impacting the integrity of Docker images signed by their cosign Terraform Provider. Fortunately, this ended up being a near-miss incident.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
8 min 2024-02-21
## 2023
Do we need new antidotes to protect against the poisoning the supply chain of Generative AI?
research

Do we need new antidotes to protect against the poisoning the supply chain of Generative AI?

TL;DR

Data poisoning is a serious threat to the supply chain of generative AI solutions. The major ramification of not validating the integrity of data sources is a loss of trust. Traditional defenses like hardened pipelines and least privilege access still apply.

Chasen Bettinger
Chasen Bettinger
Chasen Bettinger ex-Product Security Engineer

Chasen was there at the inception of the security research team and authored one of the first articles exploring the intersection of Supply Chain security and AI/LLM model poisoning. A passionate advocate for Software Supply Chain security from the Big Apple, he contributed to in-toto and connected with the core contributors behind these frameworks.
10 min 2023-09-01
Erosion of Trust: Unmasking Supply Chain Vulnerabilities in the Terraform Registry
research

Erosion of Trust: Unmasking Supply Chain Vulnerabilities in the Terraform Registry

TL;DR

Our exploration of the Terraform Registry revealed a critical vulnerability: unlike providers, modules lack cryptographic guarantees from the Dependency Lock File, making them susceptible to supply chain attacks via pwn requests.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
7 min 2023-06-22
## 2022
SLSA dip - At the Source of the problem!
research

SLSA dip - At the Source of the problem!

TL;DR

An in-depth analysis of Source Control Management (SCM) attack vectors and mitigations using the SLSA model, covering insider threats, account compromise, and Branch Protection configurations for GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
19 min 2022-11-18
SLSA dip - It's Build Time!
research

SLSA dip - It's Build Time!

TL;DR

A comprehensive analysis of Build/CI environment attack vectors using the SLSA model, covering GitHub Actions exploitation techniques including pwn requests, cache poisoning, self-hosted runner compromise, and secrets exfiltration.

François Proulx
François Proulx
François Proulx CTO

François is the CTO of Boost Security, where he continues to lead the security research team. He co-created the poutine Open Source CI/CD scanner and co-founded the Living Off The Pipeline (LOTP) project to describe the abuse of build tools for lateral movement. After spending years teaching defenders how to secure their workflows, he is now demonstrating how attackers are dismantling them, most recently with SmokedMeat, the open source red team framework for CI/CD pipelines.
14 min 2022-11-18