Gogs is a standard open-source code hosting system used by many developers.

Several Gogs vulnerabilities have been discovered recently by the cybersecurity researchers at SonarSource. 

Gogs can be hacked through these flaws, which put its instances at risk of source code theft, backdoor implantation as well as code removal.

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Gogs Vulnerabilities

Despite Gogs’ widespread use, with more than 44,000 GitHub stars and 90 million Docker image downloads, these vulnerabilities remain unpatched.

This finding highlights the need to secure development tools and self-hosted code repositories.

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The Gogs’ built-in SSH server contains an Argument Injection Vulnerability that allows authenticated attackers to execute any command on the server.

The vulnerability exploits the ‘–split-string‘ option in the ‘env’ command to bypass security measures.

As a result, this vulnerability continues to be unpatched even in the latest Gogs release (0.13.0).

This security issue is consequently exposed in about 7,300 open Gogs instances on Shodan that largely endangers source code integrity and server protection for several organizations using Gogs for code hosting, reads SonarSource report.

In order to exploit the Gogs SSH server vulnerability, three conditions must be met:- 

• The built-in SSH server needs to be switched on.
• There is a necessity for an authentic SSH key.
• The use of “env -–split-string” compatible version.

Exploitable set-ups typically employ GNU core-utils in Ubuntu or Debian, while Alpine Linux-based Docker images and Windows installations are not affected.

If registration is enabled, attackers can easily create accounts and add SSH keys. Admins can confirm this vulnerability by checking their SSH settings in the admin panel and look if ‘env –help’ shows ‘–split-string’ among its options.

Gogs maintainers ceased communication after initially accepting vulnerability reports, leaving all four reported issues unpatched in the latest version. 

As a result, users must implement their own mitigations to protect their installations.

Recommendations

Here below we have mentioned all the recommendations and mitigations provided by the security analysts:-

• Disable the built-in SSH server
• Disable user registration
• Switch to Gitea
• Argument Injection in the built-in SSH server
• Argument Injection when tagging new releases

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