Papers › Automatic Security Assessment of GitHub Actions Workflows
Automatic Security Assessment of GitHub Actions Workflows
Giacomo Benedetti, Luca Verderame, Alessio Merlo
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The demand for quick and reliable DevOps operations pushed distributors of repository platforms to implement workflows. Workflows allow automating code management operations directly on the repository hosting the software. However, this feature also introduces security issues that directly affect the repository, its content, and all the software supply chains in which the hosted code is involved in. Hence, an attack exploiting vulnerable workflows can affect disruptively large software ecosystems. To empirically assess the importance of this problem, in this paper, we focus on the de-facto main distributor (i.e., GitHub), and we developed a security assessment methodology for GitHub Actions workflows, which are widely adopted in software supply chains. We implemented the methodology in a tool (GHAST) and applied it on 50 open-source projects. The experimental results are worrisome as they allowed identifying a total of 24,905 security issues (all reported to the corresponding stakeholders), thereby indicating that the problem is open and demands further research and investigation.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections