An exposure of sensitive information vulnerability was identified in GitHub Enterprise Server that could allow an attacker to disclose the names of private repositories within an organization. This issue could be exploited by leveraging a user-to-server token with no scopes via the Search API endpoint. Successful exploitation required an organization administrator to install a malicious GitHub App in the organization’s repositories. This vulnerability impacted only GitHub Enterprise Server version 3.17 and was addressed in version 3.17.2. The vulnerability was reported through the GitHub Bug Bounty program.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:
Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:
Information exposures can occur in different ways:
It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.