CVE-2026-32946 MEDIUM

CVE-2026-32946: Egress Policy Bypass via DNS over TCP in Harden-Runner (Community Tier)

Vendor Step-Security
Product harden-runner
Weakness CWE-693
Published March 20, 2026
Last update March 20, 2026

CVSS base score

4.6/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required High
User interaction None
Confidentiality
Integrity

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

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

March 20, 2026 CVE published
March 20, 2026 Record updated