Overview¶
ID: actions/missing-workflow-permissions Kind: problem Security severity: 5.0 Severity: warning Precision: high Tags: - actions - maintainability - security - external/cwe/cwe-275 Query suites: - actions-code-scanning.qls - actions-security-extended.qls - actions-security-and-quality.qls Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
If a GitHub Actions job or workflow has no explicit permissions set, then the repository permissions are used. Repositories created under organizations inherit the organization permissions. The organizations or repositories created before February 2023 have the default permissions set to read-write. Often these permissions do not adhere to the principle of least privilege and can be reduced to read-only, leaving the write permission only to a specific types as issues: write or pull-requests: write.
Recommendation¶
Add the permissions key to the job or the root of workflow (in this case it is applied to all jobs in the workflow that do not have their own permissions key) and assign the least privileges required to complete the task.
Example¶
Incorrect Usage¶
name: "My workflow" # No permissions block Correct Usage¶
name: "My workflow" permissions: contents: read pull-requests: write or
jobs: my-job: permissions: contents: read pull-requests: write References¶
GitHub Docs: Assigning permissions to jobs.