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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

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