CI/CD Bot Command Injection

What Is Broken and Why

Some repositories implement "ChatOps" patterns where maintainers post special comments (e.g., @bot publish, /deploy staging) to trigger CI/CD workflows. The issue_comment and pull_request_review_comment triggers run in the base repository context with access to secrets. When the workflow fails to verify that the commenter is an authorized maintainer before checking out and running PR code, any repository contributor (or in public repos, anyone) can trigger privileged jobs — including those that publish packages, deploy to production, or access sensitive tokens.

Key Signals