In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment.
Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated
services or resources.
The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.
If attackers gain access to Atlassian API tokens or OAuth credentials, they will be able to interact with Atlassian product APIs on behalf of the
compromised account. This includes products such as Jira, Confluence, or BitBucket.
What is the potential impact?
Below are some real-world scenarios that illustrate some impacts of an attacker exploiting the secret.
Compromise of sensitive source code
The affected service is used to store private packages and repositories. If a token is leaked, it can be used by unauthorized individuals to gain
access to your sensitive code, proprietary libraries, and other confidential resources. This can lead to intellectual property theft, unauthorized
modifications, or even sabotage of your software.
If these private packages contain other secrets, it might even lead to further breaches in the organization’s services.
Supply chain attacks
If the leaked secret gives an attacker the ability to publish code to private packages or repositories under the name of the organization, then
there may exist grave consequences beyond the compromise of source code. The attacker may inject malware, backdoors, or other harmful code into these
private repositories.
This can cause further security breaches inside the organization, but will also affect clients if the malicious code gets added to any products.
Distributing code that (unintentionally) contains backdoors or malware can lead to widespread security vulnerabilities, reputational damage, and
potential legal liabilities.
Compromise of sensitive data
If the affected service is used to store or process personally identifiable information or other sensitive data, attackers knowing an
authentication secret could be able to access it. Depending on the type of data that is compromised, it could lead to privacy violations, identity
theft, financial loss, or other negative outcomes.
In most cases, a company suffering a sensitive data compromise will face a reputational loss when the security issue is publicly disclosed.
Modification of application data
Applications may rely on data that cannot be distributed with the application code. This may be due to the size of the data, or because the data is
regularly updated. This data is downloaded by the application as it is needed.
If an attacker can gain access to an authentication secret, they may be able to alter or delete this application data. This may cause parts of the
application to misbehave or stop working. Maliciously altered data could also contain undesirable content which results in reputational damage.
