Pipeline Pandemonium: How to Hijack the Cloud and Make it Rain Insecurity

The talk opens with a primer on CI/CD pipelines and the common providers, including Jenkins, CircleCI, TeamCity, GitLab and GitHub Actions, with GitHub Actions and AWS as the focus. The speaker, an offensive security engineer, explains why pipelines often hold the most serious cloud attack paths: developer access and stored credentials are reachable from a single repository and are seldom monitored.

The middle section walks through attack paths. Secrets kept in repositories, environment variables or pipeline settings can be located by searching code and reading workflow files. Masking of secrets in logs is easy to get around with simple text transformations or encoding. Pushing a new branch with a malicious workflow runs code without any approval. Cloud roles that trust GitHub's OpenID Connect integration can be assumed from workflows, and a loose wildcard in the trust condition let an outside repository gain access. Pull request triggers can satisfy weak conditions, and a demo showed stolen tokens used to approve and merge a change.

The closing advice centers on least privilege: limiting roles to the tasks they need, restricting which repositories developers can reach, separating runners by team, tightening trust conditions, scoping secrets to protected environments and branches, and keeping session lifetimes short. The speaker also urged forwarding GitHub logs to monitoring and said GuardDuty had been inconsistent at catching misuse. An audience question confirmed the scenarios assume an insider with developer access.