The Travis CI API is leaking thousands of user tokens, allowing threat actors easy access to sensitive data in GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub, a new report from Aqua Security’s cybersecurity arm, Team Nautilus has found.
Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service, that developers can use to build and test software projects hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket.
According to Team Nautilus, tens of thousands of user tokens are exposed via the API, allowing pretty much anyone free access to historical clear-text logs. In these logs, more than 770 million of them (all belonging to free tier users), are tokens, secrets, and other credentials that threat actors can use to move laterally through the cloud, and initiate various cyberattacks, such as supply chain attacks.
Service providers alarmed
Travis CI doesn’t seem to be all too bothered about the matter, as Nautilus said it disclosed its findings to the team and was told the issue was “by design”.
“All Travis CI free tier users are potentially exposed, so we recommend rotating your keys immediately,” the researchers have warned.
While Travis CI doesn’t seem too preoccupied with this, service providers are. Almost all of them, Nautilus says, were alarmed, responding quickly with wide key rotations. Some verified that at least half of the findings were still valid.
The availability of these developer credentials has been an “ongoing problem since at least 2015”, Ars Technica noted.
Seven years ago, HackerOne reported that its GitHub account was compromised after Travis CI exposed a token for one of its developers. A similar scenario happened two more times after that, once in 2019, and once in 2020, the publication stated.
Travis CI did not comment on the new findings, and given that it once already said it was “by design”, it probably won’t. Developers are advised to proactively rotate access tokens and other credentials, from time to time.
