Cybersecurity researchers at Wiz have disclosed a GitHub Actions workflow injection vulnerability in Snowflake public GitHub repository, snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net, that could have allowed attackers to execute commands through a specially crafted GitHub issue. According to the researchers, the vulnerability affected the repository continuous integration and continuous delivery workflow rather than the Snowflake Connector for .NET software itself, and no released version of the connector was impacted. The issue was identified in the .github/workflows/jira_issue.yml workflow, which automatically executed whenever a public GitHub issue was created. During execution, the workflow exposed sensitive environment variables including JIRA_BASE_URL, JIRA_USER_EMAIL, and JIRA_API_TOKEN within the same workflow step. Wiz explained that this configuration created an opportunity for malicious input submitted through a GitHub issue to influence shell commands executed by the automation process.
The researchers found that the workflow inserted user controlled GitHub issue titles and descriptions directly into a shell execution block without proper protection. They also observed that the workflow attempted to validate github.event.pull_request.user.login even though the event was triggered by an issue rather than a pull request. According to GitHub documentation, attempting to access a property that does not exist results in an empty value, meaning the intended validation failed and did not prevent a normal GitHub issue from reaching the vulnerable workflow. During authorized security testing, Wiz Red Agent initially encountered a shell syntax error while attempting to exploit the weakness, but after modifying the payload, researchers successfully received an out of band callback from the GitHub Actions runner. This confirmed successful command execution and allowed them to retrieve the Jira API token used by the workflow. Wiz reported that the exposed token belonged to qa@snowflake.net and provided read access to Jira projects covering engineering activities, security compliance, and bug bounty tracking hosted on snowflakecomputing.atlassian.net. The researchers noted that the associated Jira permissions, workflow execution records, and audit logs are not publicly available.
Wiz disclosed the vulnerability to Snowflake through HackerOne on June 23, 2026, under report number 3819931. According to the company, Snowflake merged a fix on the same day through pull request number 1402 by replacing direct GitHub expression expansion with environment variables that are safely passed to jq as arguments. The vulnerable workflow had been introduced only five days earlier after pull request number 1218 was merged into the default branch on June 18, 2026, while the corrected implementation remains available in the repository master branch. Snowflake stated that its internal investigation found no evidence of unauthorized access resulting from the issue. Wiz added that the exposed Jira token was rotated on June 24, and Snowflake review found no signs that it had been used by any unrelated external party during the five day exposure period. However, the company has not publicly released the underlying audit logs related to its investigation.
Wiz described the vulnerability as originating from a GitHub Copilot Autofix related change, although examination of the repository history does not definitively show that Copilot authored the vulnerable code. The explicit Copilot co authored commit modified a different workflow file named jira_close.yml, while the unsafe changes affecting jira_issue.yml appeared in a separate commit attributed by GitHub to another contributor. Both commits were later included in the June 18 squash merge that listed GitHub Copilot Autofix among its co authors, confirming Copilot participation in the overall pull request but not direct authorship of the vulnerable workflow. The disclosure also aligns with earlier guidance published by GitHub in July 2025, which warned developers against inserting untrusted issue data directly into workflow execution blocks and recommended using intermediate environment variables to safely handle user supplied content in GitHub Actions workflows.
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