Skip to main content

TH16130

Detected presence of software components that can access sensitive cloud workload configuration.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passhighhighNoneNone

About the issue​

Software components sometimes need to interact with sensitive parts of the runtime environment, often requiring privileged access to accomplish a task. Cloud workload configuration includes high-value information such as cloud provider credentials, environment variables containing secrets, and configuration files used by cloud and container orchestration tools. That information is used by applications running in cloud and containerized environments. Attackers often abuse access to cloud workload configuration to harvest secrets from developer machines and build environments, which can later be exfiltrated to attacker-controlled infrastructure and used to gain unauthorized access to cloud resources. While the presence of code that accesses cloud workload configuration does not necessarily imply malicious intent, all of its uses in a software package should be documented and approved. Only select software components should consider using functions that read cloud workload configuration. One example of acceptable use for such functions is infrastructure-as-code tooling that legitimately needs to read credentials to provision or manage cloud resources on behalf of the developer.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Investigate reported detections as indicators of software tampering.
  • Consult Mitre ATT&CK documentation: T1580 - Cloud Infrastructure Discovery.
  • Consider rewriting the flagged code without using the marked behaviors.

Incidence statistics​

ReversingLabs periodically collects and analyzes the contents of popular software package repositories for threat research purposes. Analysis results are used to calculate incidence statistics for issues (policy violations) that Spectra Assure can detect in software packages.

This section is updated when new data becomes available.

Total amount of packages analyzed

  • Linux: 562K
  • NPM: 5.12M
  • Nuget: 735K
  • PS Gallery: 17K
  • PyPi: 838K
  • RubyGems: 203K
  • VS Code: 113K
  • Windows: 3.7K

Total detections per repository

For every repository, the chart shows the number of packages that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many packages in each package repository were found to have the specific issue described on this page. This information helps you understand how common the issue is across different software communities.

If a repository is absent from the chart, that means none of the packages in that repository triggered this policy during analysis, or the policy was not used during analysis.

Distribution of total detections by project popularity

For every repository, the chart shows how many of the total detections belong to the Top 100 (1-100), Top 1000 (101-1000) and Top 10 000 (1001-10 000) most downloaded projects. This information helps you understand the impact of the issue within each community, making it clearer when the issue affects the most popular projects.

If the chart shows zero values for all of the top project groups, that means all detections were in unranked projects (lower than 10 000 on the list of most downloaded projects).