Arpit Jain
Supply-chain security researcher | Grad student at MIT
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
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Grad student at MIT. Supply-chain security researcher. 102 published CVEs credited by name, including a critical authorization flaw in pgAdmin 4 and several in Red Hat products, where the vendor advisories carry a named acknowledgement. Over 650 merged contributions across 200 open-source organizations including apache, google, kubernetes-sigs, containerd, prometheus, sigstore, OWASP, NASA and NIST, most of them security or supply-chain hardening. Builds mitigation-aware CI/CD vulnerability scanners. Active contributor to CNCF, sigstore and SLSA, OpenSSF, and US federal government projects.
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Finding Pwn Requests in OSS: Auditing CI/CD Pipelines for Supply-Chain Vulnerabilities at Scale
CI/CD pipelines are one of the highest-leverage attack surfaces in the application supply chain. A single misconfigured GitHub Actions workflow can hand repository secrets and write tokens to any external contributor who opens a pull request.
This talk presents a methodology for finding these weaknesses at scale across open-source organizations. It covers four vulnerability classes: unpinned third-party actions (the CVE-2025-30066 pattern), pwn-request code execution via pull_request_target, excessive GITHUB_TOKEN scope, and expression injection into shell steps.
Two open-source scanners implement the methodology. One audits SHA-pinning across a GitHub org. The other does mitigation-aware triage: it detects when hardening like persist-credentials: false or insider-only gating neutralizes a finding, so output stays actionable rather than noisy.
The talk walks through real disclosed findings, including a CRITICAL-severity pwn request where a pull_request_target workflow executed attacker-controlled build scripts with secrets in scope. Attendees leave with two working scanners, a triage framework for separating real findings from false positives, and concrete fix patterns they can apply to their own organizations.
Validation at scale: the methodology behind this talk has produced over 320 merged security fixes across 75 open-source organizations (apache, google, kubernetes-sigs, containerd, prometheus, vuejs, eslint, mongodb, ruby, redis, OWASP, NASA, NIST), plus five private vulnerability disclosures including a CRITICAL-severity pwn request. Each merged PR represents an independent maintainer reviewing and accepting a scanner-identified fix.
One Line of YAML Leaks Your Secrets: The Pwn-Request Pattern
A pull_request_target trigger plus ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }} in a checkout step. That combination lets any external contributor run arbitrary code with your repository's secrets and write token. This is the "pwn request" pattern, and it's in production workflows across some of the most popular open-source projects on GitHub.
I'll use a real finding (a CRITICAL-severity pwn request I discovered and privately disclosed in an Apache project) to explain how the attack works: what pull_request_target does differently from pull_request, why adding permissions: read-all doesn't protect you, and why the attacker needs nothing beyond opening a pull request.
Then I'll show the three mitigations that work: splitting into unprivileged build and privileged post-processing steps, using persist-credentials: false, and gating on the head repo matching the base.
Hardening Federal Open-Source CI/CD, One Pipeline at a Time
US federal agencies (cisagov, GSA, NIST, and 300+ other orgs) publish open-source code on GitHub, but their CI/CD pipelines carry the same vulnerability patterns as everyone else: unpinned actions, overly broad tokens, and pwn-request triggers. Executive Order 14028 and the CISA SSDF set the mandate, but the gap between policy and workflow-level implementation is wide.
This talk covers what I found auditing federal repositories for CI/CD weaknesses, and the process of turning findings into accepted contributions. I share before-and-after examples, explain why least-privilege permissions matter even for public repos, and discuss practical challenges: review timelines, CLA processes, and framing a PR so it gets merged.
Over 320 merged security contributions across 75 organizations, with accepted fixes in NASA, NIST, and other federal agencies, plus private vulnerability disclosures to government repositories.
Secrets in Public Git Repos: Why It Keeps Happening and How to Fix It
Every day, thousands of API keys, credentials, and tokens are accidentally leaked into public Git repositories, putting users and organizations at massive risk. In this lightning talk, I'll quickly break down why secret sprawl happens despite increasing awareness. I’ll highlight real-world cases like Trufflehog's recent discovery of over 12,000 live API keys inside DeepSeek's AI model training data, demonstrating how leaked secrets can silently persist and escalate risks. I'll demonstrate how simple open source tools like Gitleaks, Trufflehog, and Git pre-commit hooks can detect and prevent exposures. Attendees will leave with immediate, practical steps to stop secret leaks in their repositories — before attackers find them.
Securing Open Source Code: From AI Vulnerabilities to Supply Chain Defense
Open source security faces growing risks from dependency vulnerabilities, leaked secrets, insecure AI-generated code, and supply chain attacks. In this talk, I will demonstrate how to use open source tools like Trivy, Grype, Gitleaks, and Trufflehog to scan dependencies and detect exposed secrets.
I will explain how to build and maintain a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to protect codebases and organizational assets. Using real-world case studies—Trufflehog’s discovery of 12,000+ live API keys in AI training data, the Rabbit R1 credential exposure, and supply chain incidents in the US and Japan—I will show the impact of poor code security practices.
Live demo will highlight how AI models trained on insecure code can propagate vulnerabilities. Attendees will leave with practical techniques for scanning codebases, securing their development pipelines, and preventing the next generation of supply chain threats.
Arpit Jain
Supply-chain security researcher | Grad student at MIT
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
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