Changing Nothing, Yet Changing Everything: Exploring Rug Pulls in GitHub Workflows
Software supply chain attacks have become a significant threat to modern software systems. By exploiting the complex and transitive nature of dependencies, malicious actors have been able to perform significant attacks, also taking advantage of the dynamic relationship between software components and their dependencies. In Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) ecosystems such as GitHub Actions, developers assemble workflows out of reusable Actions. However, these Actions–in particular JavaScript ones–come with an intricate network of dependencies. As they evolve, these dependency networks expose GitHub CI/CD pipelines to subtle vulnerabilities that may be introduced without any modification of the workflows themselves. This paper investigates such phenomenon, which we call “rug pull” within GitHub workflows. Through formalization and an empirical analysis of real-world workflows, we characterize the propagation and persistence of such vulnerabilities as well as their remediation. Our findings highlight architectural considerations needed when designing secure yet maintainable CI/CD pipelines, emphasizing the need for careful dependency management and coordinated responsibility across the software supply chain.
Fri 26 JunDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
10:30 - 12:00 | Governance, Observability & SmellsJournal First / Research Papers / Software Architecture Showcase / at Theatre 2 Chair(s): Sandro Speth Technical University of Munich | ||
10:30 20mResearch paper | Changing Nothing, Yet Changing Everything: Exploring Rug Pulls in GitHub Workflows Research Papers Edoardo Riggio Software Institute, Faculty of Informatics, USI Lugano, Cesare Pautasso Software Institute, Faculty of Informatics, USI Lugano Pre-print | ||
10:50 15mPaper | Visualizing the Runtime Behavior of Microservices Software Architecture Showcase Supun Wijayakoon Eindhoven University of Technology, Filip Zamfirov , Jacob Krüger Eindhoven University of Technology, Michel Chaudron Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, Tomas Molina Pre-print | ||
11:05 20mResearch paper | Evaluating Large Language Models for Detecting Architectural Design Rules Violations Research Papers Ruoyu Su M3S, University of Oulu, Alexander Bakhtin University of Oulu, Noman Ahmad University of Oulu, Matteo Esposito University of Oulu, Valentina Lenarduzzi University of Southern Denmark, Davide Taibi University of Southern Denmark and University of Oulu Pre-print | ||
11:25 20mResearch paper | TwinArch: A Digital Twin Reference ArchitectureJournal First Journal First Alessandra Somma University of Naples Federico II, Domenico Amalfitano University of Naples Federico II, Alessandra De Benedictis , Patrizio Pelliccione Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila, Italy | ||