CVE-2026-32946 PUBLISHED

Egress Policy Bypass via DNS over TCP in Harden-Runner (Community Tier)

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 17.03.2026 Published: 20.03.2026 Updated: 20.03.2026

Harden-Runner is a CI/CD security agent that works like an EDR for GitHub Actions runners. In versions 2.15.1 and below, the Harden-Runner that allows bypass of the egress-policy: block network restriction using DNS queries over TCP. Egress policies are enforced on GitHub runners by filtering outbound connections at the network layer. When egress-policy: block is enabled with a restrictive allowed-endpoints list (e.g., only github.com:443), all non-compliant traffic should be denied. However, DNS queries over TCP, commonly used for large responses or fallback from UDP, are not adequately restricted. Tools like dig can explicitly initiate TCP-based DNS queries (+tcp flag) without being blocked. This vulnerability requires the attacker to already have code execution capabilities within the GitHub Actions workflow. The issue has been fixed in version 2.16.0.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:H/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 4.6

Product Status

Vendor step-security
Product harden-runner
Versions
  • Version < 2.16.0 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure CWE
  • CWE-863: Incorrect Authorization CWE